Hi Ryan – I wouldn’t necessarily use this on a busy site and/or a low spec hosting service. But if the need you have is for this then we’ve found that on our client sites it can handle 500 concurrent users simultaneously. You can also adjust the polling frequency and we do advise accordingly.
There’s no really easy way to do an active discussion plugin that works on any WP install and doesn’t require a third party system.
Actually, the problem lies in the fact that the plugin is just doing a POST to /, which causes the entire wordpress instance to bootstrap, skipping the cache, building all the widgets and sidebar elements etc. It would be far, far better to adjust it so that it is doing a GET to a custom handler, i.e. mysite/active_discussion.php?postid=66364 which would simply handle a query to the database and return the json needed. So even though we have a dedicated box with plenty of memory and cpu, and plenty of resources, we also have a site thats been around for years, has tons of resources loaded on uncached pageviews (sidebar+archives etc).
We adjusted the polling frequency, and it simply didnt work – didnt change anything. Mostly because instead of the polling frequency being a sitewide setting, it was set individually on every post as it was created. So the only way to retroactively apply polling frequency settings is to go back into every post and change the value. (although we did some database level adjustments to get around this – so not the end of the world).
I’m using the same method for this as Automattic use for the P2 theme.
It should, when making ajax requests, die not long after the plugins_loaded action and never load the front end HTML. If I was writing this for a one off job that needed to work with thousands of concurrent user then in all likelihood I’d write it so that it didn’t load any part of WP when making ajax requests. However this is a generic plug-in and needs to work with other plug-ins and any changes they make to comments.
I can’t recreate the scenario where polling frequency is saved on a post by post basis. Whenever I make a change in the discussion settings on every install of this I manage it changes for every post. It sounds like you may have something aggressively cashing the front end or you have something that is turning the output into static HTML.
Yes, we are using W3-Total-Cache, as we are a busy site. Every hit that skips the cache is expensive, primarily because our sidebar is extremely cpu/database intensive.
And yes, I was mistaken, the polling frequency is a global setting. It was whether or not live discussion was enabled which was post by post (the _spectacula_threaded_comments_live, in wp_post_meta), as we were trying to disable the live discussions and we couldnt get them to stop.
I haven’t put any coding time into WP plugins, as I manage mostly drupal sites, but is there really no way to just get the modified comments without going through the entire plugin process? no segmentation whatsoever?
You can have auto-update off by default and enable it on a post by post basis – simply use the Allow Live Discussion option. You may need to go to screen options (dropdown top-right) in order to see this on the post page.
Just thinking on – if this tool is really important to you then we can modify it to your requirements for a fee. Just drop us a line through the interconnect/it Contact Form. After all, plugins don’t write themselves for free 🙂
