Okay for people 'not in the know', excluding some information we still won't discuss in public.
Some time ago myself and James had a discussion with Crimson on IRC where we got talking about some tests he'd done with compiling templates. That were very interesting, I asked that he continue and let us know what happens as did James. We were both
very eager to keep this going. As I said to Crimson @ the time, it looked unlikely this would go into 2.0 but 2.2 was a strong possibility, as Crimson will (I'm sure ...) agree, he was fine with this. After this I don't recall receiving anything from Crimson re: progress, certainly don't have any PM's left over nor any emails (my appologies to Crimson if I did and they've just been deleted or 'other').
Meanwhile, after one of our developer chats (where the topic of compiled templates was raised, Nathan saying he'd already thought about compiling the templates and dumping them into the DB), Nathan, myself, James and Bart started to run a few checks. We basically timed
every single major operation in phpBB 2.0, everything from the includes in common through to individual SQL operations and even generation of the page_footer(!). We found that on most pages the includes took most time, followed by SQL, template compilation was generally down the list taking only a minority of the total page gen time. We also ran other tests (which I've already posted the results of) whereby we loaded up the DB with 200,000+ posts, several tens of thousands of users and found (as per James) that even on a relatively low spec'd system 2.0 performed very well. I also ran tests whereby I created 200+ new sessions in two minutes (
new sessions, not just browsing two already existing sessions) on a typically spec'd, typically loaded (AFAIK) virtual host, again 2.0 performed very well, page gen times being 2-4s.
Today, Crimson's posted this hack, now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong in him doing this and he's completely free to do so. However, we did have plans to examine this for 2.2, it's on the feature list (yes, we do have a feature list other than the one in my head
). So this sort of renders that useless, and I freely admit to being a little miffed about that because I like introducing surprises into 2.x and, if the results are correct then for large and/or very busy servers this would have been a nice incremental improvement.
Now, Kanuck pissed me off because I'm a little tired of being 'questioned' all the time as if I'm a newbie who doesn't know what's going on or what's planned. I'll say this once and once only, I have a
very good idea what's happening and what's planned. As Lead Developer of 2.0 it's my responsibility to oversee day to day running of the 2.x project, what happens to it, what goes in it (persuant to an agreed group plan), etc. So as I said in response to Kanuck, before you tell me (or indeed any other dev) to "calm down" or "grab a beer" (noting that I can't actually drink alcohol these days(!)) do me a favour and run through this question "Does Paul have a reason for replying in the way he did? Does he perhaps know something I don't?" ... this may save future arguments
Also remember that my replys can be abrasive at times, sorry but that's just me, if you don't like it "tough" or so to speak
You'll also note that on (not rare) occassions I'll go out of my way to be helpful (keep this in mind when thinking about the abrasiveness of my replies too
).
We're at present trying to get to a new release, we can't do that when people keep saying "Can we have this? Can we have that?". So I'll also say this once, no, you can't have x feature in 2.0 unless the code in which it will 'fit' is still being finalised ... and right now this means little bits of search and style admin ... and neither is likely to gain any significant additional feature at this time. I'm sorry if this pissed anyone off but we're continually bombarded with "Why don't you release it?", "When is it being released?".
Everyone remember this was re-written from the ground up, we've been working on this for some 10 months ... what you see here is nowhere near what was originally envisioned (ask James), it's gone
way beyond that. As such you can think of this release as a 'starting point' for even greater things to come ...