Just to keep things interesting, I’ve changed the way our Ajax news feeds are displayed when you load an LGF page. Previously, the default news feed was Yahoo’s ‘Top Stories’ feed. Since this gets stale pretty quickly, now the first news/blog feed that appears when you load a page is chosen at random from the list. So one page load you might see The Corner, and the next, the Daily Kos.

(LGF is not responsible for ideological whiplash injuries suffered from unsupervised reading of news feeds, of course.)

Also, when you pick a different feed from the drop-down menu, while the Ajax back-end system goes out and fetches it, the message “Loading…” is displayed. Just to keep things all nice and informative. I’m into feedback.

In the not-visible-but-important category, I made a couple of large changes in the LGF Blog Engine that, under normal operating conditions, will greatly improve the performance of the site for most lizards. The registration system was designed in the Jurassic Era of LGF, without thought for scaling to 3 million plus visitors a month, and it was making our server’s hard disk do waaaaay too much work. That disk thrashing has now been reduced by a factor of 20 or more, by our new session-based authentication code.

To further decrease server load, another bottleneck has been eliminated in our statistics display. The ‘visitors online’ count was previously generated during each page load; now it’s cached at one minute intervals by a cron job. Instead of thousands of directory reads every minute, it’s now down to one. (The ‘visitors online’ count works by counting the number of active PHP session files.)

If an LGF post hits the Digg front page, or the Drudge Report, or some other huge-traffic site, these improvements are like origami in a hurricane; in that case our single server just can’t give out connections fast enough, and we’ll still slow down and possibly crash. But as I said above, under normal conditions these improvements should make comment posting and overall site performance significantly better.

For longer-term performance issues, our second server isn’t online yet, but the infrastructure is being readied.

UPDATE at 2/24/07 6:50:38 pm:

Quite a few people have reported a problem where the ‘Digg’ link at bottom left of each post seems to lead to the wrong page at digg.com.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can fix; that little Digg button area is created by code that comes from Digg, and I’ve verified that I’m passing it the proper parameters. Their code seems to have a caching problem in some browsers; I’ve never seen this happen in Safari.