what's the best way to find a de-indexed thread?

Can we have the "view a new answers page from another date" function back please? I kind of liked that.

Hi Ailsa,

I dunno why it's been removed in old (this) ILX, probably just a case of removing the entire search function, which is for the most part extremely inefficient. It's there in the new ILX. Worth bearing in mind though that a lot has been disabled.

Part of the problem with existing ILX is that over the years, lots of functions were added on that simply didn't perform well at all. These were added when the number of users was relatively low, so it didn't matter, and they worked well, but with growth in recent times, these functions are what isn't coping with the current number of users, and it's only set to get higher. There have been around 1500 registrations since the start of the sandbox...

I'll turn that back on for you, Ailsa. I just whacked everything off in a hurry. Keith OTM though.

Aw, bless. It's nice to see what things were like on certain days. It's certainly not one of the essential functions though.

Also, please excuse my techie ignorance if this is totally wrong and/or stupid, but wasn't part of the point of the new server/bandwidth/whatever meant to be to allow faster searching and increased functionality and cope with lots of users and the like?

All the hardware in the world isn't going to help if the code running on it is inherently resource-intensive and unscalable. (Slight exaggeration but still.)

Ailsa,

Most things in computing work on orders of magnitude, in that searching poorly, can be orders of magnitude worse than searching well, if you know what I mean. It's also a tradeoff with complexity too, amongst oter things, so for example, if people want to search for what things they've posted, then there are a few choices...

- Do a 'brute force' search, which means looking through all of ILX's records for what you've posted (there are around 5 million of them).

- Cut that down and force you to specify say a month in which to look (still looking about around 120,000 records)

- Do some work to make sure than when you add a post, it records the fact that you (ailsa) wrote this post somewhere else. This is the most efficient way, for searching, but it slows down the add of a message, because you have to insert this as well. Trouble is, extend this to 50 features that people want and searching is fast, but inserting is extremely slow... 'Poxy Fules' can follow. Also, the code becomes very complex and no-one understands how it works.

Everything is a tradeoff in computing and unfortunate as it is, you just can't have everything. Additional resources can help, but only to a point... Well, as I say, it all works on orders of magnitude. It's not reasonable for us to say that we've run out of space on this box, so we need another ten of them, so we have to make do.

ILX hasn't got an expensive box; they cost half a million quid. It's good, but it's only one smallish computer. Its resources are limited.

What I'm trying to do, is make judgement calls on what people need, versus what, say, three people want, but just today. This way, hopefully we can keep the thing together. What's clear is that people would happily forego esoteric search functions, if they're able to read posts.

WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO FIND A DE-INDEXED THREAD

I don't know. Did you categorise it properly? Can you remember which month you started it in? Could you not just open the relevant category/month and do CTRL-F? Revive the 'dig up stuff on ILX we can't find' thread?

(Sorry for the hand holding - it's not really rocket science)

i didn't start the thread but i'll go month by month ok