Quest For Speed
It’s been a good test getting lots of data into the system. However, making Bluebloomer run quickly has been tough…
Search
Search has been the toughest. I’m testing a variety of different approaches. Again it’s a trade of accuracy vs speed. Although at this stage even simple fetching of indexed single words is taking too long. Hardware and setup may be some of the problem here, though I’m not 100% sure.
Caching
I tested caching topic results. Caching all results was unwieldy and slow. What I’ve now done is limited the amount of results in the cache and also split them into different tables depending on filters and sorting. This new method I haven’t yet tested, but my hopes are high. I’m guessing much of Bluebloomer’s traffic will be visitors viewing topics. If the cache works for these, I should be able to save some strain on the server.
Background Server
I have added another server to Bluebloomer. This will help in a few ways. First it gives me a place to backup the database. But in addition to this it can also handle data from the crawlers, create topics, cache topics and a few other odd jobs. Once again, this takes strain off the main public server.
All of this is taking some time to get sorted, but in my opinion any speed improvement is worth the effort. A slow site is not so much fun to use. Will keep trying.
