Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Notifications unavailable

It's kind of concerning me...isn't this two full days that notifications have been disabled for maintenance? I hope everything's okay. Any chance we could be explained just what might be going on?

Kim is fixing a few things. Nothing to worry about

We're still inside of 24 hours since the notifications were taken down yesterday, and with some luck, they'll be back up late tonight.

I am going back and optimizing the living bejeezus out of all of our more intensive features to try and make the site nicer to use for everyone. We've been experiencing some short but really intense and annoying lag surges once or twice every day, and I don't think we should have to put up with them when we're all trying to play and socialize.

Notifications are first on the list of things that require a huge amount of compute power to gather and combine. You've probably noticed that if you have a lot of friends, notifications seem like they take all day to load. So they are first on the list of things being worked on. Hopefully tomorrow you will wake to notifications with a typical compute time calculated in itty bitty fractions of a second.

After notifications is made lean and mean, I will keep working down the list of culprits until we stop having problematic lag.

I didn't quite finish all the optimization I was working on, but I got far enough to put it back online. I'll aim to finish the rest of the upgrades soon, probably without any more downtime.

Is t me or did my notifications load faster?

Gaaawd I hope so.

I have found no crashes with my phone so far, hurray!!

*pokes and prods at them*

Hmm. I think they froze for me as they said the last posting to this thread was 33 minutes ago but I am pretty sure it was a few hours ago.

I'm at least glad they're back up!

Someone needs to bake Kim a cake, she works so hard on this site.

I noticed a glitch with a number of notifications being duplicated. Screenshot sent to Kim.

And I agree with Celestina, Kim puts so much into this site.

I suddenly got this wild and crazy idea...but sadly I need my comp to be operable to initiate. Darth I'll pm the details to you and you can tell me what you think.

I haven't noticed any glitches so far. No double notifications, no freezing. It behaves much better on my phone too!

Edit: Gasp! Double notification! WE'VE GONE BACK TO THE PAST!

@Dylan: Notifications now cache their past calculations, especially during peak hours, and sometimes might not calculate new time stamps for up to 15 minutes. I took a quick look at the notifications being sent to you, and they all looked up to date. Keep in mind that it only reports activity from people that you have befriended, so if the recent activity on this thread was by people not on your friend list, a time stamp several hours ago would be correct if that was the last time someone you WERE friends with posted. EDIT: I found a small case in which timestamps wouldn't update for longer periods of time. I've put in a hopefully temporary patch that will force an update in that case.

@darth_angelus and SeraphicStar: Thank you both for writing me details about the duplicates showing up, and the handy dandy screenshots. I'm not sure yet what caused those, but I'm looking into it right now. Fear not! I had no expectations for rewrites as big as this to be without some initial glitches. We'll get them worked out! In the meanwhile, I've blanked your caches, which should at least clear those particular extra notifications.

@CelestinaGrey: Yes, I know you can't currently scroll forward and backward through the notifications. This was actually a capability that was removed early last week. It will be coming back, but not until the new system has been completed and has proved itself capable of handling the strain.

On my own I also located a bug that could cause a lot of trouble with viewing user profiles and the like, but I think it's been corrected now.

Thanks everyone for keeping an eye out for me. You're tremendous helps!

Not a problem Kim!

Clearing the cache seems to have worked, I'll let you know if it happens again

I'm seeing the duplicates now too. That's actually a good thing, because it means I have my own data to test fixes on.

Do what must be done, do not hesitate, show no mercy!

After much testing, I believe I have an accurate diagnosis. I'm gonna take a nap before I try to cure it though. Thanks for your patience and continued bug reports, guys.

A well deserved nap

Sleep well, Kim!