So we’ve been work­ing a LOT on the GameCore docs as of late, mak­ing good progress, but the more of us that end up work­ing on the docs, the slower the site has been. Which con­sid­er­ing there’s only a cou­ple of us was some­what disturbing.

Turns out that we had been using a mal­func­tion­ing so-called ‘ajax’ menu dru­pal mod­ule for the left-hand book nav­i­ga­tion. Basi­cally for every-single page view of the docs site, the mod­ule would com­pile a list of lit­er­ally every sin­gle ele­ment of every one of the books that we had in the documentation.

Our SQL server was basi­cally hav­ing a fit because it was being ham­mered with queries — to give you an idea of what exactly the out­put of this was: the sin­gle html line con­tain­ing the book nav­i­ga­tion was upwards of 197 THOUSAND char­ac­ters wide.

LOL

So, need­less to say, we dis­abled that mod­ule, and hey look at that, server load went down to, oh basi­cally noth­ing as a result.

The good news? Well, the GameCore docs site is much faster now, and all of the sites (includ­ing this one) that are on the server (ones that access the sql server, which is most of them) should be much snap­pier as well.

Great fun.