Election Night Tech Stuff

I would love to help in any way I can. My first thought is if it’s possible to have the entire forum be functional we should strive for that. But, if it isn’t possible, then that’s just a reality we have to deal with.

Can you simply increase the size of the redis cache?

In redis.conf it is possible to set maxmemory to 0 which means it will utilize resources until there aren’t any and I guess then the site just crashes, so maybe that’s not what you want. But you could attempt to overprovision, and monitor memory usage of the cluster/whatever it’s hosted on and if it’s going up past a certain threshold, flip a switch and only enable certain threads.

Is something like this possible?

I think this is a great idea and if it helps the site stay fully functional, I’m all for it.

Should offload some of this to discord imo.

Also there has to be some way to disable the “live db updating feature” I. E. every few seconds when you scroll through a thread it makes a db call that marks posts as read, see if you can turn that off.

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I’m ok with it but the entire forum being available would be the preferred

Unsure of whether we need that many threads.

I think we could get away with just two:

  • POTUS
  • Other stuff
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It’s set in the Discourse conf and we’re already at recommended max of 25% of available system memory (4 out of 16 GB right now).

I’m sure that’s possible somewhere, but it would take me hours to even begin to know where to look and how to do it. The codebase is very large and opaque, and I am not much of a programmer.

Not exactly. I do know that what cripples us when we hit significant slowdowns is iowait, but there are no corresponding actual disk read/write spikes when it happens.

I probably wouldn’t mess with the code or recommended settings this close to the election. More likely to make things worse/unstable, imo. (Edit: This goes for whoever is running “the simulation” - no surprises please)

If you have an easy way to scale up the underlying hardware - I’d recommend that (but I assume it isn’t easy).

Your idea seems worthwhile to me. I doubt anyone is really going to complain about the other threads…

This has to be a non-programming feature/setting of this software, it has to be incredibly resource intensive to have this feature on.

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  1. POTUS
  2. Other races
  3. Riggage / Court stuff
  4. Trump containment

Also need to make sure someone can create a new thread when we hit 10k posts in a thread

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There is no setting for this in the software and afaik no way to set it in the conf either.

Wouldn’t that effectively break the site anyway? How would you find your place again in an 8k post thread?

Its not really about the feature itself its more its frequency like its within 1-3 seconds, seems like there should be a way to throttle the database hit to 10-30 seconds. But whatever it just seemed really obvious to me and if you’re not seeing it forget it.

Still think an “official” discord channel makes sense though.

We’ve already done that and are at the top end of basic droplets on DigitalOcean. The only place to go from here is a dedicated virtual machine that would triple our monthly cost and be annoying to deploy and then have to scale back a couple days later.

I agree, but I don’t think many people will use it. There have already been at least a couple attempts that have failed to attract much use.

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No discord please. I’m too old.

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Yea I think danger would be that people not on discoed might miss out somewhat.

What about a pop up chat room of some kind?

I bet the site will be fine. They have to have much bigger sites than ours. The problem when Trump got pozzed was the whole internet went down on the west coast or something.

Discord is pretty easy to use.

It should be fine - I mean we only have ~50 active users. Say it bumps up to 100 on election day, and add another 100 lurkers.

That’s still well below the traffic of a production grade website - I can’t imagine we should have issues unless the discourse software is just absolute ass and not intended for high traffic, which I know is not true.

I’ll try to do a little digging and educate myself on this topic this weekend. This stuff is basically what I do for my job.

I thought this was the problem. It isn’t meant to be a chat room. There have already been problems during debates and other high-turnout events.

Maybe election day won’t be so bad though because it will last all day (and longer) instead of just the two hours of a debate or whatever.

I thought everything was going fine during the last debate until everything ground to a halt for 4 minutes and lots of people got temporarily logged out. I’ve made some additional changes since then but still haven’t been able to figure out exactly where the problem was.

What makes this so annoying to plan for is that it’s going to be a one-off event. I don’t have the opportunity to make adjustments and see what works. That’s why I’m considering limiting the entire forum to just a few threads for one evening. It’s one shot with no do-overs.

You can use a free tool like jmeter to simulate load testing. Or you can shell out about $100k for SOASTA.