Bugs and Suggestions This Far

Please... PLEASE make it possible to set my email to private. The most private I can make it is "friends" wich isnt very private to me.

Don't know why but for some reason now I can't click on a page in a forum post to go to it, I have to go back to the topic, then from there click the page I want to go to...onto suggestions...can we make the reply button work? No sense posting a reply onto your own wall, it should automatically post it to the persons wall your trying to reply to...

Your codebase appears convoluted and slow for using RUBY. Do you not know PHP or have a grudge against it? Reason I ask is if you used NGINX as a frontend for SSL and non SSL, Varnish to cache non ssl requests with Apache running PHP and APC then you'd have a really fast site. Especially if you compiled Apache to use MPM PreFork and Mod_PHP with RUID2, you'd have a blazing fast site, as long as your server is a VPS or dedicated with at least 2GB RAM. Looks like your site needs caching BAD on some sections, you really need opcode caching if not already using. Forgive me as my knowledge is primarily PHP, but those are some suggestions to consider since it appears your current codebase is not working too great.

<p>lol, I've never seen anyone advocate "switch to PHP, it's fast" before. Software in any language can be optimized and sped up, porting code to a new language is not necessary to get basic performance improvements. And caching is universal, applying techniques for caching slow/repeated actions is the same in ruby as in any other language.</p> <p>Some of those suggestions are also off base. MaiOtaku doesn't have HTTPS, there is no SSL to put a frontend in front of. And while Varnish is a lovely piece of software, it unfortunately doesn't work as well on sites where the majority of content is tailored server side for each user. It works beautifully on Wikipedia (well technically the main caches are using Squid at the moment) where there are millions of anonymous readers being served by the caches but not so well when about every user has a unique session cookie and the content of each page is different for different people due to notification lists, profile info, logout, etc. RUID2 also looks to be completely irrelevant.</p> <p>But more importantly the suggestion of using opcode caching is <strong>way</strong> off base. OpCode caching is a PHP thing that is only a necessity because of a design flaw in PHP.</p> <p>When a PHP script runs for a web request it starts up a new environment, executes all the PHP code from scratch compiling any script it needs as it goes, and then when the request has been served, it throws away everything it did. OpCode caching simply tries to save the compiled code so it doesn't need to be re-compiled.</p> <p>Other programming languages don't work like this – well unless you're using CGI, which no-one sane would do. When you start up a server for a typical Ruby, Python, Node.js, etc, etc... project a process is generally started when the server starts, not once for every request that comes in. When this process starts up the code for the application is compiled and then run doing the basic initialization like creating classes, setting up caches, etc. After that when a request comes in the server requests that the process handles a request. The <em>same</em> process then handles the second request, and the third, and the fourth, and so on, never exiting simply because the first web request it got was finished, it stays running in memory.</p> <p>Because the process is not closed after each request, the initial setup done by both the language in compiling the code and also the initial setup work the site's code itself does not get discarded, the same environment is simply used over and over. As a result you get absolutely no performance improvement using the technique that OpCode caching does for PHP.</p>

Daniel, Well its clear my lack of knowledge of how RUBY works prompted a pretty detailed response. Yes, PHP has its flaws but it also is overall a decent language for web design. I don't like what I'm not familiar with and I have aggressive caching on http://teamblackfox with an A from GTMetrix on Pagespeed and YSlow. I'm a server admin, not a developer though so I just prefer what is easier for me to understand.