Well I had a little fuck up. I erased a bunch of new comment indicators in the database. Everybody with a user id over 50 has had all new comments marked as read in the database. These are the only people with elevated powers and a user id over 50 (not just 'remember me' signed in people):

joester
sally mckay
Kristin
selma
crystal
L.M.

So those people definitely lost any indication of new comments. Sorry about that. If you had some very old ones they might still show up but they'd have to be pretty old (over a month.)

To be clear, the comments haven't been erased. Just the red new comment markers on the front page.

Probably a lot of the other accounts over 50 don't actually read the site or use the new comments, but there are probably some at least on Sally's page. I'll write you an email Sally if you don't see this. Sorry.

- jim 11-16-2005 2:19 am

In case anyone is curious about this. I was having trouble backing up the database. I suspect this is because the data set is getting to big for the amount of RAM we have on that server. Our new box is orders of magnitude more powerful so this isn't a problem. But anyway, I was trying to prune some data and I figured a good place to start would be the unread_comment table. I hadn't looked at it in a while, but I've always had in the back of my mind the problem that pointers to unread comments do not expire. So if someone has an account, but never uses it, the pointers to unread comments will just add up and up and up.

Anyway, much to my surprise, when I looked in that table there were 1.8 million unread comments. It just seems insane to me that everything still worked with that many. Remember everytime you hit the front page it has to read through that entire table once for every page you have listed on your front page! MySQL (the free database we use) is really impressive. That's not even a huge table in the whole scheme of things (although it is on our 512 meg PIII system)

I deleted over 1 million of those rows, although a flipped > sign was responsible for the trashing being much more thorough than I had meant. (And the database is backed up in case you were worried.)
- jim 11-17-2005 9:10 pm [add a comment]


thanks
- jimlouis 11-21-2005 3:19 am [add a comment]





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