What should HPC:Factor do next?

Anyone following the changelogs will have notices the high volume in site tweaks that have been going on recently. This is part of the planned summer update, which is almost at an end. I don't expect to have any time for any more major site work until the winter holiday season.


Now that the last of the "secret projects" has been released under the auspices of H/PC:Update, inexorably I have to wonder "where do we go now?"


Of course, this is your site, so I would love to hear your ideas (I know I ask that fairly often, but I see it as a good thing to keep asking).


The only fairly concrete plans that I have at the moment for the public side of the site are:

• Adding member comment support to all Front Page (FP) news items


• The kernel needs to be rewritten; OK, you got me, that really benefits the servers than you guys, but it will make the site faster

A small number of people have asked me recently if I had been planning a site redesign. I can officially state that of this moment there are no plans for HPC:Factor v3.0.


So, if you have any thoughts, think we need a new direction here is a soap box for you.

I think the logical next step on the evolution of HPCFactor would be to repair the search option to really make it functional...I really miss the old one.

Rich

Rich,

It bugs me as well, but there is no (apparent) reason for the problem with the search system. Short of a new database server (£$€¥) if it is a software issue, we have not been able to find it.

It isn't through lack of trying either!

If there are any MSDA's on the board who would be willing to talk to me about it, please make themselves known. Perhaps you will have some ideas over what could be causing the timeout issue, ideas that we are currently missing.

I don't know why they timeout or anything about why it does what it does. But I do know that it works if:

You severely limit the time span for your search
You limit the search terms
You limit the forums you search in

It acts like it is running out of memory while it is caching the data. Maybe you could insert a little code into the search so that while it is searching and storing the data it finds, it will concurrently write the data to a file...maybe something will show up to shed some light on where or why it is crapping out...

Or maybe it is opening files looking for data and not closing them up...would that cause any problems in your software? I'm just totally shooting from the hip since I don't know anything really about programming...

Rich

Edited by Rich Hawley 2007-07-14 5:30 PM

Rich,

I can better that because I can sit and watch what is pipedin and out of RAM on the server while these rq's are being made. There is sufficient memory available on the system, it just drops out well before the prgramatic timeout is expiring.

Right now there is 467,696 KB of physical RAM unallocated on the forum server. The peek comitment for the current session is around the 462,000 KB mark. The server processors don't care either, they burst the initial response out to the SQL server and settle back down to have a snooze.

I know it is never reaching it, but does increasing the timeout to some ridiculously high value have any effect at all?

That would be quite useful if you fixed the search. I want to use it almost every day and it usually doesn't work for what I am searching for.

Small suggestion: add mscdex', RTFM's, PocketDVD's, and ShadowMaster's sites to the list of Community Partners.

None.
There is a submission form. Any member is allowed to submit at any time. http://www.hpcfactor.com/qlink/?linkID=161

DVD Catalyst is already in there http://www.hpcfactor.com/community/directory/?mstrcat=13

Is it possible that there's a bad (corrupted) message in the archive, and if your search comes across it, it crashes the search function?

Here's someone who had the same error code (80040e31): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum47/2743.htm

Also: http://tutorials.aspfaq.com/8000xxxxx-errors/why-do-i-get-80040e31-...
which mentions something about ip address lookup, stirring a recollection that hpcfactor recently changed from "hpcfactor.com" to "www.hpcfactor.com"


Starting from Rich's observation about limiting the span of the search, I found that I could search all forums, all posts, for "npopuk" as long as I only searched in subjects (un-checked messages). Is there something about the contents of messages (those with attachments? odd signatures?)?

Edited by gjcoram 2007-07-17 8:20 AM

gjcoram,
Nice try, but it has nothing to do with anything. You're (server ad) pretty daft in my opinion if you require DNS resolution in a mission critical network service.

gjcoram: you can search for messages, not just subjects, try specifying a poster name.

And we can always use Google to do HPCfactor site specific searches. That's what I usually do.

We need to hear from Insurgent on this one, he seems to have vanished into the ether at the moment.