Forum OpenACS Development: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what?

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1: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what?
Posted by Tom Jackson on 12/07/02 06:43 PM
Another Saturday night, and I ain't got nobody...

Okay it isn't Saturday night, but I was still hopin' that the search of forums would work, or at least advertise how it works, so I don't get too upset when it fails.

I've been installing Oracle 8.1.7 on Redhat 8.0, occasionally checking in here to find the threads related to the subject. If you search for '8.1.7', you get two pages of individual messages, mostly from two threads, dealing with 8.1.7: installing on RedHat 7.2 and upgrading from 8.1.6. So on the third page, you finally reach the most recent thread dealing with Redhat 8.0.

So I am smart, right? The next time I search for 'RedHat 8.0': nothing! 'Redhat 8.0': nothing! 'edhat 8.0': nothin'! Hmm, okay, '8.1.7 and 7.2': advice: 'and' is not necessary, but no results. '8.1.7 7.2': nothing!

This isn't search, this is a blind dart game. This is not meant as a criticism of those running and maintaining this great resource, but when my memory is better than the search function, we are all in real trouble.

Also, new posts don't appear on the front page of the site very quickly, making this 'bogus' as well. Is this a dynamic site, or what?

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2: Re: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what? (response to 1)
Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 12/07/02 07:30 PM
Tom, openfts will index anything you want as long as you change the parser to suit your needs (just in case you have some extra time :). Having said that, IIRC, the default installation only indexes dotted values with three values, i.e. X.X.X but not X.X, eventhough a decimal type is defined in the parser I do not remember off the top of my head why it is not indexed (probably it has something to do with the initialization but I'm not sure).
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3: Re: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 12/07/02 07:44 PM

"Also, new posts don't appear on the front page of the site very quickly, making this 'bogus' as well. Is this a dynamic site, or what?"

The "bogus" you mention is "caching because we can't hit the database every time because our machine is not that big and is used by other sites".

When one posts a message to the forum, one is taken back to the thread where it belongs, so one sees the message is in there.

Feel free to donate more hardware so we can hit the database every time. We could use another stick or two of 512 MiB of RAM (we only have 512 right now) and a 15,000 RPM SCSI disk.

We'd love to make the site "non-bogus". You can send your hardware donation to OpenForce, since they own the machine and graciously provide the bandwidth. They'll take your donation and install it on the machine and we'll make sure we make the config modifications on our OpenACS installation.

-Roberto

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4: Re: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what? (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 12/07/02 10:36 PM
The "bogus" you mention is "caching because we can't hit the database every time because our machine is not that big and is used by other sites".

Bogus means giving a false impression of the facts. Maybe mention the last time the data was compiled, so everyone knows what to expect.

When one posts a message to the forum, one is taken back to the thread where it belongs, so one sees the message is in there.

I wasn't questioning if my message got posted or not, and I didn't expect to see my message linked on the front page. What I thought would happen, is that my post might at some point freshen the thread so it would appear on the front page. I looked there since I didn't initially find it in my search using 8.1.7.

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5: Re: Forums search: 'Bogus' or what? (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 12/09/02 03:31 AM
As I posted before, it's not much more effort to do caching "right."  I've done this for the 3.x bboards...

The very simplest way is to have the insert script erase your cache for the portal rather than waiting for the cache to time out in N minutes.  This can even improve performance if post frequency is low enough -- openacs.org still measures minutes per post rather than posts per minute, I'd guess.

As I've also asked before -- is 4.x THAT much slower than 3.x?  If so, shouldn't this be ringing alarm bells somewhere?