Summer school finished last week. All in all, I liked cataloging — I was good at it — and I expect I’ll be starting little cataloging pet projects in different places in my free time. And, in fact, I have some free time. School doesn’t start again for another two weeks, and there’s nothing good on TV. But before I start new projects, I should really finish some of the old ones.

At work we’ve made some web changes. Our departmental calendar is now fully under the campus WebTools calendars, which you might remember were one of the supported data sources for my Announcr project in April. Now that I knew we had good source information in the calendar, I fired up Announcr (after not really paying attention to it these past few months,) and noticed it wasn’t working. The control interface was fine, and the inputs were still getting polled, but none of the output feeds worked. Manually loading a feed seemed to time out. I started exploring, and it looks like the SQL JOIN statement that is the core part of what makes the RSS part work is taking about 36 seconds to return. That’s not good. See, Announcr has been polling the last few months, and the database grown to about 13k articles. I guess my design didn’t scale well.

I’ve turned off the polling, and I will probably take the existing web stuff down until I can figure out why. I need to poke at the 4 table join and see which part is hanging it up. Ick.

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