http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=507312

Hi folks.

Performance reasons mandated a change to the user nodes xml ticker. Users with many posts were causing undue load on the DB server so we had to change it. The changes are as follows:

Its well known to the gods that the primary existing use of the user nodes ticker is to monitor reputation changes in the users posted nodes. We would prefer that people stop doing this, as it requires fetching an awful lot of nodes. In order to get people to stop doing this we have created the noderep xml ticker which is designed to provide data on only those nodes that have changed since the last fetch. Please read the following list to see how it works:

So now all you XP whores can use the ticker to watch your nodereps in something close to real time. Enjoy. ;-)

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Changes to the User Nodes ticker and introducing the NodeRep XML ticker
by thor (Priest) on Nov 10, 2005 at 12:16 UTC
    I don't personally use such things, but with the restriction on the interval between fetches, would it be possible to have some sort of "development" version that doesn't hit the db, but still spits out XML in the form that this ticker does? I know that if I were to create a client for this, I'd probably need more than 50 tries before the time restriction kicked in. Moreover, it'd be nice to continue development on such a thing and not have to deal with waiting 10 minutes in between authorized refreshes only to find that you forgot something.

    thor

    Feel the white light, the light within
    Be your own disciple, fan the sparks of will
    For all of us waiting, your kingdom will come

      When developing against web services, I capture the server responses to disk and replay them from disk. That way, I get exactly reproducible results and errors, and it also helps me to separate the gathering of input from the program logic, as I have to be able to easily replace a socket connection with a filehandle.

      If you're using any network based transfer and can install libpcap or Winpcap, using Net::Pcap to capture and feed your input makes replaying sessions very convenient, as long as they don't need any interactivity.

Re: Changes to the User Nodes ticker and introducing the NodeRep XML ticker (simple client)
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Nov 11, 2005 at 13:20 UTC

    Here is a simple client that maintains a Node DB from the user nodes ticker and updates it from the Noderep ticker. It populates the node db _first_ so if you have made a lot of posts, it could take a while before it picks them all up and starts polling the noderep ticker.

    Note the client is compliant in that it determines its polling period automatically based on the information in the 'info' tag from the previous fetch.

    Apologies to davido and bobf to not using their code for this, I wanted to see how long it would take to write from scratch (not too long :-)

    Update: I modified the code slightly as it blew up when only one node was returned by either ticker.

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    $world=~s/war/peace/g