Serato Web Team update / Improvements to ScratchLive.net

At the end of May we launched the new Serato.com (read more here serato.com). The main improvements are that the whole site is searchable now (not just the forum as on ScratchLIVE.net), it looks much better, and it now has information about all Serato products including Scratch LIVE (read more here serato.com).

All ScratchLIVE.net forums are now also visible on Serato.com.

What's this Website Discussion Area for?

When we launched the site we wanted to get your feedback so we started a new forum area to talk about our Websites. You're here now, thanks for dropping by. This area has been visible on there for a while but today we thought we'd let you see it on ScratchLIVE.net.

What the Serato Web Team is working on?

The Serato Web Team is still working on Serato.com. The forum has been completely rewritten for that site and there are still some small bits of functionality that we're working on.

Improvements to ScratchLIVE.net

Next we'll be looking at improving ScratchLIVE.net. Let us know if there is anything you'd like to see on ScratchLIVE.net.

I think I have only one request:

Make the forums faster. A lot faster. They are soooo slow :(

Yes, the slowness of the forums often is even worse as myspace....

That hurts!

Is it really THAT slow for some people? It's rarely ever been myspace-slow for me, and I'm on here at least 2-3 hours every day.

It is... even www2 is slow now :(

But often it is that slow.... Don't know why, it has no real relation with the number of logged in users. Looks like there is one bottleneck somewhere, or something does get throttled above a certain load.

I can vouch for the really slow loads. Many times I will click a link in the forum and just open another tab to read a different web site until the forum page loads.

How about an edit button for scratchlive.net?

Could it have to do with a TCP/IP settings ot the server? Like not sending fast acks, so everytime you loose one packet there is a real TCP/IP timout/retransmission to wait for. That would explain why some don't see any delay and some do, and also why the delay varies that much.

The bottleneck is the database. There are a lot of different optimisations that can be done. The new forum code brings in a few, although only really scratches the surface. Yes, the other optimisations will eventually happen too!

cut the discussion by PAGE by 50/100/200/etc! newest replies on page 1..
and maybe the main post always stay at the top, replies at the bottom divided by page.

try openning the Serato-setup picture thread ...slow!

Yep, we have a plan for that. Its especially dumb when you've read the first 2000 messages and you're on a slow connection or an iphone or something.

Are we talking about the You DJ so bad thread now? :)


Yeah. The forum is sloooow at times. That's the reason you see a lot of double posts.

30 seconds... thats the normal time it takes to load the tracked discussions area.

C'mon... I'd rather have a real speed boost than all the fancy new colors, designs etc. :(

Fair call. Is there any difference in speed between the tracked discussions area on ScratchLIVE.net and the one on Serato.com?

I don't know, I don't use the Serato.com forum page due to the bug reported here:

www.scratchlive.net

OK, we're working on that one.

Oh, slow page loads also happen on other pages... took 30+ sec plus to load the thread index page for the 1.8.2 PB area.

I just tried and got it in two seconds on serato.com. Same for the 1.8.2 area. The new forum code should be marginally faster than the old. Although I've hardly ever seen myself the slow loads you're describing on either site, so it's hard for me to tell for sure...

That bug with marking read... Are you still seeing it on serato.com? There have been a couple of fixes that have gone in recently.

It's still there. It occasionally also happens on scratchlive.net .



I should had been more precise: 30 seconds is not a time which is unusual, though it does not happen always.


Even on Serato.com I already experienced slow page loads, 20+ sec to load certain pages.

26s to load the "all forums" page
24s to load the "off topic" index
30s, 8s, 14s, 3s, 11s, 20s... to load the "off topic" index

Wireshark shows after the http GET request an immediate ACK from the webserver.. then 15s nothing... then we get a http 200 OK and a gzip'ed response.

I doubt this has anything to do with my internet connection. I've seen this across multiple internet lines.

Have you seen it just now? Or in the past couple of days?

Serato.net: Now. I can still reproduce the bug easily.
ssl.net: In the last couple of days.

nik39, give it a try now.

There was a race condition in the old code, and because I simply duplicated the logic into the new code, I brought it across. Only I did things in a slightly different order, which made the period where the race condition happen be wider, thus why it was happening more often on serato.com than scratchlive.net.

That race condition is gone now. *Hopefully* that's fixed the main reason why people have been getting threads not marked read properly. Although I suspect there's some other niggling bugs still in there...

I am hoping as well. A quick test gives the impression that it works fine now on Serato.com

Did you also make changes to scratchlive.net?

No, the scratchlive.net code is unchanged, so the race condition still exists there. We're avoiding putting time into the old code when it's destined to be replaced completely by the new in a few months.

Makes sense.

Just give us our PM's on Serato.net so we can switch over ;)

Yep. That's what I'm working on right now :)

What's that little red arrow (triangle) next to some discussions?

It means that this is a discussion which is completely new, which you haven't seen before. It makes spotting new threads easier.

Thanks!! Neato.

Forum was down for a while here, but now that its back up it seems to be blazing fast compared to yesterday.

+923832188409823 LOL
To damn slow. It doesnt matter what computer im on.

I can sometimes understand why people post a questio. which has already been answered somewhere else.
The search doesn't let us filter enough. let me filter by a date range. Also, let me sort the results of a search by poster, most recently updated, by original date posted and by read/unread.
also, can we place a user rating system (was this useful?) to put relevant topics closer to the top and push the bragging and trash talking further down.
Also an easy flagging system to help the Serato team pull down inappropriate and off topic poss.
There is a great wealth of info here and I've learned so much (it just took longer than it should). Anything that helps us filter junk to get in/out faster is a plus. thanks.

Hey ToddLarBoy
We've just rejigged the search on Serato.com, and will update the one on ScratchLive.net soon.


Click the "report" button and we'll chase things up :D

the line height of these forum posts needs changing it's a bit high..

I find that when I clear my cache, the forum drops down to snail speed.......it's really annoying. It's gotten to the point that I just don't clear my cache anymore. There are a few other forums I belong to that perform in a similar way, so I just expect this behavior now. If anything can be changed to improve this, that would be cool.