Randomland bugs and errors.

[Nick]

I can handle allot of traffic as long as its not on the gallery. The main page is small and all the images get reused. So I don't think people just looking at articles will slow things unless there are more then 50 or so at the same time. But that's purely conjecture.

[Nick]

The server is slow like a dead bug stuck in 2000 year-old molasses. I underestimated how far its gig of memory would go. Running the host machine (mail.randomland.net) and the guest machine (www.randomland.net) is just too much for it. Each wants more then 500mb to run well and its all but unusable. So I will put some of my machines memory into it and see if I end up missing it. Unless someone has a LGA-775 board that takes ddr and has more then 2 memory slots. I have ddr laying around but nothing to use it in (the board that in the server will use both ddr and ddr2 but only one at a time and only 2 chips each) so yeah. I will fix that tomorrow. When its probably going to rain. Not that anyone will notice the system lag and there are probably only 4 people who frequent the site, and they are all admins.

[Nick]

I dropped the system to run level 3 (command line only) with only a minimal improvement in response time. So  I guess I cannibalize my computer until I get more ram. Or I might find that there is not noticeable difference and just work with less. Whats windows really need anymore? 4 gigs min to run photoshop or a game without too much paging?   

[zourtney]

Well, if you're short on machines, you can use my old one. But it's loud, slow, and short on ram. You usually seem to have enough machines to go 'round though.

[Nick]

I could scratch together another machine (Brent gave me his old computer that has a bad memory something or other. No matter what you put it in it fails a memory test but it had a gig of ddr and a Pentium 4 and I could find a cheap mobo) but I was trying to minimize the number of computers I had running at any one time (both for heat issues and power consumption - not to be green but to be cheap) I could just run everything off of one install (web server and mail) rather then having the mail server host the VM for the web server. But then the hope of easy, complete, quick to restore backups would be gone (backups from making copies of the VM.) So more memory is the best option to allow both installs running in that box a little more room to breath. I used to have some just laying around but I seem to have given it all away.

[Nick]

Ok. The server now has 2gigs instead one one and its ddr2 rather then ddr. Performance seems to have more then doubled now that it isn't using the paging file.

[zourtney]

Yep, it's much, much better now.

[zourtney]

The Drupal favicon and the custom favicon fight for dominance. I notice my little RL symbol working for days at a time. Just now it switched back to little Drupal drippyface.

I simply replaced the icon file in the current theme. I'm not sure how it's getting overridden. Maybe it's pulling it from a default theme or default location? I think I read of other people having similar problems.

edit 10-17-2009. It seems to be my work computer that is causing the issue. However, with Xmarks installed (firefox bookmark syncing), the symptoms get passed around. Nonetheless, can you see any reason why one computer would display the wrong favicon? I surely can not -- it has been going on for too long to blame on caching issues, I think.

[zourtney]

Login persistence is whack.

Wait....is "whack" a good thing? Because the whole "log in on the forums and enter a really big number for length of stay" thing is a little weird. Plus, I just logged in on the forums and I'm not logged in on the main site.

This seems classifiable as a "bug."

[Nick]

I changed the session time to an arbitrarily large number. Hope that helps. (I am still logged in from yesterday at the moment)

[zourtney]

Cool. Login issues seem resolved. For now, at least.

On another note: "Books" are broken in Drupal. Existing ones are fine, except it seems that the prev-next links got removed. I'm having the same problem today as I did yesterday: I can not create new books or add existing nodes to a book.

If we are going to use some other sort of custom navigation for multipage stories, let me know. But as of now, it's borked.

[Nick]

Books are designed for multi page stories. I don't know what is up with them. On a only slightly related note I installed (yet another) module that takes the top taxonomy term from a page (the top term should be its category) and uses it for a breadcrumb. This works for sub-terms too if we actually start adding terms to the taxonomy rather then using the free tagging boxes. I think it would be nice to be able to add terms to the multi-select boxes of terms whilst creating a new node. Then you would not need to go into taxonomy beforehand. But if we flesh out our taxonomy a little more we wont have that problem because there will generalized enough terms already in place.  (Like camping, hikeing, bikeing, fishing, pottery, tree-napping and so forth)

[zourtney]

Cool. It seems like it should be set up like that "out of the box." But it's Drupal: the linux of cms's.
Anyway, that makes sense. I like your style. We can discuss the layout more on that one "permalinks" topic so this one doesn't become uselessly long.

http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/smfforum/index.php/topic,50.0.html

[zourtney]

Bug: server date seems to be off by about 30 minutes. (This makes universally wrong, regardless of timezone!) 

[zourtney]

I'm getting email failed delivery messages again