the current forum system, Discourse, along with its installation/configuration, is fucking slow. both in terms of network latency (eg., ~5 seconds per login procedure point (login request, username entry, password entry, logged in)) and rendering speed (even Tremulous, a 3D FPS game with complex (client-side) VM-JIT gamelogic, runs 5x as fast). this is fucking annoying to work with.
i’ve also heard that on the server, Discourse uses a fuckwhooping 1GiB of RAM and shitton of CPU time.
either find and switch to a forum system created by non-amateurs, or… no, fuck it, find and switch to a forum system created by non-amateurs, period.
oh boy it’s another devHC thread about grangerhub features. Grab the popcorn and the reading glasses because we’re in for some sparky vs devHC essay writing.
I’m not going to pretend GH at it’s current state is perfect (replying in extended post chains is forever fucked and the login button is fugly), but this is a very curious thread you’ve made.
Atleast on my Canadian internet with Bell, I haven’t encountered any latency issues either through Ethernet or Wifi. Even when I did, it was mostly on my end (as internet can cut out randomly using a PowerNet adapter) and Discourse makes things EZPZ by saving your post before submission. Before I claim its an issue on your end, perhaps its a symptom of where GrangerHub is hosted? We’ll need an objective way of determining this.
Not gonna lie, this might be one of the dumbest things you’ve ever typed, which is saying something considering your above-average intelligence and your skills as a programmer. I may lack the exact knowledge, but Tremulous is a fucking 2006 Quake 3 game using OpenGL and hardware acceleration. We don’t even have WebGL as a standard in 2016. Most browsers (especially Firefox) have issues with hardware acceleration for various reasons (Shit bugging out, Linux dependencies, laptops using hybrid graphics, Mozilla being retards, etc).
Comparing an entire program written in C/C++/Whatever using OpenGL to a forum (whose rendering issues can be solely dependent on the browser) is just fucking retarded.
But even assuming this is the case, I just tried running GrangerHub on Microsoft Edge on my 2GB Dell Venue 8 Pro (which is basically Pentium 4 tier) and the “rendering speed” was (atleast from what I can perceive) at 60FPS. Switching to Chrome using no hardware acceleration cut it down to around 20-30, but considering this is running on a tablet intel processor, Discourse runs alot fucking better than shit like Shadow Machine Forums.
To go even further, I also tried this on my old Nexus 4 (2012) running Cyanogen Android M nightly on Firefox Android and GrangerHub seems to be rendering at a perceivable 60 FPS. Of course on my Y50-70 laptop with a 2GB GTX860m, GrangerHub runs like a dream on the latest Firefox.
So thats 3 completely different devices I tested that seems to handle Discourse just fine. If anything, GrangerHub’s “rendering speed” is actually commendable. Perhaps if you told us what device and OS you were using, it’d be helpful to understand whats going on in your end?
find and switch to a forum system created by non-amateurs
Whatever my desktop, laptop and my smartphone to use GHub forum, doesn’t any problem there, but some of minor didn’t improve yet is mobile version of this website. So I hope developers will understand.
eg., icculus.org takes about 0.5 seconds to respond, which is still an order of magnitude longer than the theoretical light travelling time, but given the technological twists (indirect path, travelling substance, packeting/framing, routing, DNS resolving, TCP establishment, HTTP negotiation, etc.), i’d accept that as a base. but another order of magnitude ?
more processing power (in recent times) is not an excuse for sloppy programming (resulting in lag and low performance in this case).
PS: Quake 3 is from 1999, not 2006.
irrelevant. WebGL is primarily for rendering 3D graphics.
u’re missing the point. the game has a HUD with plenty of images and text. and it does a full set of 3D graphics rendering, collision detection (including particle physics), 3D-audio processing, continuous network communication, and more; yet the game runs much faster than the shitty forum system. now if that doesn’t induce any sense of embarrassment in Discourse developers, then i don’t know what will. the unusual comparison were only retarded if i were to claim that the game were slower — for which: „duh, more complex things need more complex processing”.
pro tip: u’re forgetting to measure the key things.
sounds like bullshit. what r the stats (the key stats, not the framerate)?
also irrelevant. i obviously have a low-end computer. i’ve also tried this forum system on a much more recent computer, and performance is still much lower compared to what it should be.
in any case, almost every other fucking website loads „relatively fast”, while this one is „fucking slow”.
oh no, that system is doomed and must be killed. fuck it.
I seriously disagree. Tremulous/ioquake3 is a standalone program written in C based on the work of AAA developers for 1999 computers using hardware acceleration and various tricks, while Discourse is a web service running on Ruby/Javascript ontop of your preferred browser. One is a videogame and the other is not. Tremulous can do “more impressive things” because it was built for an entirely different purpose than Discourse was.
You are aware that a program written in C is more low-level and “faster” than a web service running in your browser written in a different language, right? In fact I’m 100% sure you are aware and I’m still baffled that someone of your experience is still making this comparison.
You could also just be trolling me hard.
Discourse may genuinely have parts that run like shit (I’m not a programmer), however it was designed as a forum for a modern audience:
From a usability perspective, Discourse breaks with existing forum software by including features recently popularized by large social networks, such as infinite scrolling, live updates, oneboxing, expanding links, and drag and drop attachments.
However, the stated goals of the project are social rather than technical, to improve online discussion quality through improved forum software
That means its doing things alot of social services like Facebook or Youtube are doing now, which might not be the most “optimized” or “fastest” way of doing things because its focused on being consumed by more modern devices made in the past 5+ years.
Specs and OS?
So the entire forum needs to be overhauled to a completely new system because performance isn’t what “it should be”?
Tell me how I can dump reliable key tests based on the devices I own and I’ll deposit them here for your reading pleasure.
really, u’re missing the point: the forum system is fucking slow, period. (yes, one can compare Discourse to not only other forum systems and websites, but sometimes even games; did i mention, regardless, that the forum system is fucking slow ?)
is the experience of amateur web developers an excuse for running software developed amateurly, such as by amateur web developers ?
that shit practically isn’t even used. also:
is the non-use of tricks an excuse for running software developed amateurly, such as by amateur web developers ?
being developed for different-era hardware/software is an argument for using era-specific features, such as: OS APIs (or just OSes), software development layers (eg., CSS, Wayland display server), access to hardwares (video cards, touchpads, cameras, VR headsets), etc…; nothing else.
hardcore logic. ∀X: ∀Y: features of X ∩ features of Y = ∅ ⇒ impressive things of X ⊋ impressive things of Y.
if both had similar performances, then one could argue: „well, Tremulous is 100x as complex as Discourse, but Tremulous is a native application, while Discourse is for browsers, so it’s a tough call to say whether Discourse is crappy”. but this isn’t the case.
that has nothing to do with the „audience”, neither with the „capabilities of devices”, but with the „conventions in the choice of interactivity features” (eg., 1980-era computer scientists were annoyed by colored terminals, while 2010-era ones like colors).
what social services ?
now that’s retarded. recentness of devices is never an argument for sloppy programming.
if a modern-era CPU is twice as fast, then a program that was reasonably using 100% CPU should now be reasonably using 50% CPU — it does not imply that programmers r allowed to think less about performance to the extent that an equivalent program would use 100% CPU.
does it the fuck matter? imagine 4 specs ranging from 2002 to 2017, and say what ur conclusion would be.
NO.
the entire forum system needs to be overhauled because it was obviously developed by amateurs, which shows in at least its performance.
ur „ur computer sux” argument is invalid because: when i said „the forum system is fucking slow”, i didn’t mean that as „for my computer” (that would have been sort of a fallacy), but as „compared to what it should be” (ie., i took the necessary things into consideration); however, the combination of „the forum system is fucking slow” and „my computer is fucking slow” results in a situation of multiplied annoyance.
u just need to realize what the key stats r:
after submitting the HTTP request for forum.grangerhub.org, note the time for anything to be displayed, and the time for the page to finish loading.
click on „log in”, note the times again.
input ur username, note the times again.
input ur password, note the times again.
note the Tremulous general framerate on the same device.
The speed of our discourse instance is slower (than some other discourse sites) because it’s a smaller vds running it, and also it is configured to not use full resources (to leave some for a couple of other services run on the machine).
Updates to discourse also occasionally include performance improvments, so it’s hard to agree with your statements about the overall development of the software, which are clearly based on just your experience with our instance.
there is hardly any concisely explainable rule for that. it’s a „u know when u see it (provided that u’re knowledgeable in software engineering)” thing.
