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Notes -
It appears that @ZorbaTHut has been using an LLM for recent changes to this website's code. Perhaps that is the culprit. ;-)
Honestly if anything it's better at fixing these problems than I was :V Webdev has never been my speciality.
As near as I can tell, the basic issue we're running into is that load is increasing, heavily thanks to bot scraping, and that's resulting in various things that weren't problems becoming problems. The earlier one turned out to be a massive leak in our Currently Online Users reporting; this wasn't a big deal when we had maybe a few thousand users, but as soon as we started having tons of "users" (including IPs as users!) it blew up and become a gargantuan perf issue.
I'm honestly curious if rDrama ever ran into that same problem.
Anyway, the latest one was kind of sitting around passively; we did a redesign to improve performance, but it turns out we missed a bunch of stuff, and thankfully Claude knows these tools better than I do and can put in automated warnings for various performance thing. So that should cut a few hundred SQL queries on big pages.
Coupled to that was a nasty bug that would kill threads faster than they should be killed, which itself would cause server crashes, and that was a lot of boom.
The biggest problem is that I never had a good way to instrument this and figure out what was going on perf-wise, and now I have . . . some tools for this . . . so hopefully it's just a matter of squashing issues as they show up.
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