On Aug 14, 2014, at 9:10 PM, Taylor Ricketts wrote:
We’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the Gund publications page. The quick links are a hit.
But we’ve also gotten a lot of comments about how slow it is to load. The full default list is especially worrying, since it’s the first look people get, and they frequently give up and navigate away before it even loads. But the searches are slow as well.
Is there some way to speed it up? Optimize the searching somehow? Or store static versions of the whole list and each of the 4 quick searches, so that they are fast to load (and get updated whenever I update the database?).
Sure. I added a caching system. There were a few little hiccups along the way, but all seems to be in order now. Caching all searches, so popular ones ought to move faster, too, as well as leave a record of what people are looking for. Cached files expire after 7 days, so next time you regenerate the database, you need only be patient before the cache regenerates all on its own. Yes, I could make a “update cache” button, but that just adds one more step to keep track of. I could try to add code to the import process, but that gets complicated since the import code and the website code and cache files live on two different servers. It would also add Gund specific code to what is otherwise a generic utility. Yes, every 7 days or so, someone or something will visit the page, kick off a cache refresh, and will have to wait 5-10 seconds for a response, but I’ll wager that the lucky button pressor more often than not will be a search robot and not a human.
