ryan-aslett

Yes, we are using W3-Total-Cache, as we are a busy site. Every hit that skips the cache is expensive, primarily because our sidebar is extremely cpu/database intensive.

And yes, I was mistaken, the polling frequency is a global setting. It was whether or not live discussion was enabled which was post by post (the _spectacula_threaded_comments_live, in wp_post_meta), as we were trying to disable the live discussions and we couldnt get them to stop.

I haven’t put any coding time into WP plugins, as I manage mostly drupal sites, but is there really no way to just get the modified comments without going through the entire plugin process? no segmentation whatsoever?

Actually, the problem lies in the fact that the plugin is just doing a POST to /, which causes the entire wordpress instance to bootstrap, skipping the cache, building all the widgets and sidebar elements etc. It would be far, far better to adjust it so that it is doing a GET to a custom handler, i.e. mysite/active_discussion.php?postid=66364 which would simply handle a query to the database and return the json needed. So even though we have a dedicated box with plenty of memory and cpu, and plenty of resources, we also have a site thats been around for years, has tons of resources loaded on uncached pageviews (sidebar+archives etc).

We adjusted the polling frequency, and it simply didnt work – didnt change anything. Mostly because instead of the polling frequency being a sitewide setting, it was set individually on every post as it was created. So the only way to retroactively apply polling frequency settings is to go back into every post and change the value. (although we did some database level adjustments to get around this – so not the end of the world).

Just switched bikeportland.org over to using the w3 total cache this weekend. Getting some email from users as well with the same problem:

Technical Specs from one user:
Windows XP SP3
Opera 10.51, Build 3315

I fired up my opera on my mac, and everything looked kosher. I then installed the latest opera on my vmware xp, and sure enough, its getting deflated content but not deflating it.

So Im not sure where the issue lies:
A. opera says it can handle both Gzip and deflate content, but its getting deflate.(shouldnt it get gzip?)
B. Opera *should* deflate it, but doesnt. Stranger still is when I use opera’s built in dev tool (dragonfly) and load the page in ‘debug mode’ it does deflate it.

Anyhow, switching to gzip only for http compression fixed this issue for us. Basically anybody on a windows box with the latest version of opera is not going to see your site if you select “gzip and deflate – best”. Perhaps it shouldnt say “best” until this is fixed?

Here is the Raw request headers as reported by opera’s dragonfly tool.

Raw request

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.5.22 Version/10.51
Host: bikeportland.org
Accept: text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8, utf-16, *;q=0.1
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0
Cookie: __utmz=196354239.1271718114.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); __utma=196354239.472036295.1271718101.1271718101.1271718101.1; __utmc=196354239; __utmb=196354239.1.10.1271718101
Cookie2: $Version=1
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive, TE
TE: deflate, gzip, chunked, identity, trailers

Raw response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:07:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.11
Last-Modified: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:07:16 GMT
ETag: "54800d-a3ab-4849f05a1d100"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 41899
Cache-Control: max-age=3570, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
Expires: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:07:16 GMT
X-Pingback: https://bikeportland.org/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.8.5.2
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Pragma: public
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: deflate