Yes, now I'm really feelin' it.	(0 votes)
	No, still pretty slow for me.	(0 votes)
show votes
A total of 0 votes have been cast on this poll.

The hearty little sift can elves have been busy running amok in the workshop to tweak things into taking full advantage of our new servers (now that our DNS troubles are behind us [uh-hem almost]).

We've made a couple of pretty significant changes to how comment listings are managed because those are probably the single slowest point in the whole Sift game. Now that we have these behemoth servers, we are now able to cache full comment listings making them now just about instantaneous the vast majority of the time.

The way this works is the first time a comment listing is loaded, it will take a moment while each item in the listing is determined and fetched from the database (this process is like molasses because there are so many comments stored and they take up so much space). This is the slowest part of the process and, until now, happened every time someone loaded comments for a video. With this change, after that initial fetch, the entire listing will be cached indefinitely. From that point forward, any time someone requests the same listing, they will be served directly from cache with almost zero delay. This also serves to speed the entire site up in general since a good amount of load is lifted from the database's shoulders.

Of course, the listing can't stay cached forever because some elements of the listing may change (e.g., new comment added, comment edited, comment votes cast, etc.). Whenever anything like that happens, the listing will be regenerated.

Since we're using this new scheme, the old dynamic little-bit-at-a-time style listings are no longer necessary (and would actually be detrimental), so that has gone out the window. Comments will still be loaded on-the-fly in most places, but you should be able to enjoy how quickly they appear from here on in.

As always, this required a bit of tinkering, so something might be a little busted here or there. If anything seems askew, please let us know here, but first try a couple of hard reloads in your browser (CTRL+SHIFT+reload) to see if that fixes it.

P.S. Wanna take it for a test drive? Try loading old Number One Jake's ukulele video and compare how quickly it loads with how slowly it used to. On the old servers, it would commonly take up to 30-45 seconds; on the new servers, before our change, it would take about 15-20 seconds; now, it takes about 4-5 seconds (your mileage may vary).