[buro9]

Originally Posted by soletrader

Does anybody know if this hack is server intensive?

The original version was, it did a full table scan of the thread table. The version currently attached to the thread only scans the last 24 hours of the thread table. If you're on a busy forum you should have it scan less, I scan only the last hour.

Aside from that, take a look... turn on debug mode and add explain=1 to the do=xml querystring for the php file. I'm seeing the page generated in 5 queries, all taking less than 0.01 seconds, and the largest query isn't the spy query, but the ones that fetch the datastore and templates (I'm using the template layer for spy and not the echo'd HTML that spy originally shipped with).

I also reduced the number of refreshes fired by the JavaScript, from 7 seconds down to 20 seconds. As that is the highest rate of posting on my forum around peak time, so it seemed daft to be firing off so many useless AJAX calls. I'm considering dropping it further to 30 seconds, which would be about the maximum on a large forum before you degrade the user experience of the spy.

In summary: Doesn't need to be intensive, but the first version was.

Oh, and the JavaScript is horrible. All kinds of dodgy 1.0 stuff and bizarre splitting of strings. I'm very much inclined to re-write that stuff using proper DOM stuff. vBulletin is largely XHTML, there's not much excuse to break that on this page through the use of innerHTML rather than DOM manipulation. Besides... use one or the other, both are fast, but combined they are cludgy. So I'm going to change most of mine to fully use DOM stuff, and get rid of those arrays of data when objects would be just as good, or using the original responseXML.

Anyway... rambling... low server load if you use the latest version.