Category Archives: Discourse.net

Recent comments are not showing up properly for users who have never made a comment. This seems to be a bad interaction between the latest version of WordPress (3.3) and the latest version of WP Super Cache (1.0).

The bug only affects lurkers, and only the more recent comments, but those are probably the ones you want to read. I am hopeful that this will get sorted out in the next bugfix release of the cache, which is due soon. It also think it may get somewhat sorted out as the cached files routinely refresh themselves. I’ve set them to expire on a more aggressive schedule in the hopes of encouraging that process along.

Meanwhile, if you can’t bear to wait until this is sorted out, I can offer the following work-around: point your browser at the Discourse.net comments feed. In most browsers you will be able to read the full text of the comments.

Later Update: I think what is happening now is that I’ve managed to club the cache tuning settings so that unrecognized users (ie those who do not have an ‘I’ve commented’ cookie) will get to see comments 15 or so minutes after they are posted. At least I hope so. I’m going to sleep now.

In my well-beyond-marginal-returns-to-scale effort to get the blog to run a little less sluggishly, I installed XCache for WordPress 0.6 this morning. It looks a little bleeding-edge (and doesn’t install through the usual plugin interface) but promises to take advantage of the Xcache service already running on this server. I can’t really tell the difference, though.

I have WP Super Cache running (now in version 1.0!). That means if you are not a logged-in user, you’ll get served a very fast page. (Everything is fast except the Clustermap and the Iraq Body Count, which seem to be the real drags on load time. I will probably remove the Iraq count when the US claims to have pulled out at the end of the year.) But, somewhat perversely, if you are a regular reader with a cookie, you’ll get the same slow page I get. The Xcahe addition promises to help some with that, though.

I also think and hope that I’ve ironed out the bugs on the mobile theme. It works on my Android phone, anyway. I’d love to hear from an iphone and an ipad user to know how that is going.

Do let me know if you notice any weirdness as to site performance. Weirdness as to content should proceed as usual.

UPDATE: I’ve disabled the XCache module object-cache.php, as server load went up quite a bit. Correlation is not causation, but you have to wonder.

Formatting on the blog seems to have suddenly gone all weird. If I had to guess the cause, it’s some misbehavior of WP Super Cache, which I started using about a week ago instead of W3 Cache. (The change was to placate my ISP, which claimed that timeout problems were related to not having their favorite cache software in place.)

Why this should happen a week later, I don’t know, and odds are I will not figure it out until late tonight or tomorrow because I have to go out very shortly.

Sorry about that.

Update (18:30): it is fixed. I really don’t think it is anything I did.

Update 2 (12/2): Mobile stuff is borked. I’ve put a band-aid on so that it renders legibly, but comment reading and writing on the mobile version is broken. I believe this is connected to what broke comment preview on the main site. I also believe I know a solution — change WP Super Cache from mod_rewrite to PHP mode, then tag the AJAX code with stuff that tells the cache how to process it. But that’s not a trivial change, and it will create server load, at least initially, so I have to clear it with the ISP (who claim to be investigating why the server crashes at random intervals since they upgraded Debian, and asked me not to change anything while they investigate).

I started this blog on Sept 15, 2003.

And it’s still going despite everything.

If you are a regular reader and haven’t done so already, please take a minute and tell me a little about yourself.

And thanks for stopping by.

I’m happy to report that Discourse.net is again responding to IPv6 requests at 2607:f298:1:102::1f7:4c71.

Thank you to the alert reader who noticed that it wasn’t working.