One of the features of my discussion forum that folks seemed to like was the fact that all the post titles could be seen in a hierarchical tree when you first load the site. The trouble with this is that the recursion necessary to generate this tree is very CPU-intensive. You can either select all the articles, and then recurse through the data structure in memory, or you can recursively select articles from the database until you have the tree that you want. Either one of them causes lots of problems, and this is probably why most discussion board stuff opts not to do the hierarchical tree view as the main view.

So, while my load has been overing around 1.2 for the last 9 months, it’s at 0.13 now, and has been less than 0.1 for most of the last couple days.

But, of course, folks aren’t happy about it. posting delightful messages like:

For An Open Source Guru, Rich Bowen Has Really Really Let Me Down. This Site Is Bloody Silly. Even Though White Men Cant Jump, This Is A Real Low For Even A Mzungu.. Rich Should Pull-up His Socks

What I’ve noticed fairly consistently, however, is that the folks that hate it the most are those who always post anonymously and don’t actually have anything to say. The ones that have consistently posted thoughtful articles over the years simply registered a new account on the board and resumed posting their thoughtful articles as though nothing had changed.

I really wish I could understand what it is that they dislike so passionately, but, with very few exceptions, none of them will tell me what exactly they dislike – merely that it is terrible and they want me to go back to the good old days.

Meanwhile, from an administration perspective, the new software is really making me happy, and I might just end up keeping it indefinitely.