More posts = more slow, so we're temporarily hiding older posts to make the bear run faster.

Our devs continue to work on getting in a long-term fix for the performance issues we've seen as the site as grown. The performance issues are due to a couple slow database views.

The bigger these views are, the slower things get. We're trying to replace the views altogether, but in the meantime, we get a significant performance boost by filtering down to only posts and comments from the past couple months.

We're leaving this in place as a workaround until the long-term fix is done for a few reasons:

consistency; you don't have to wonder whether or not the site is in "albanian bunker mode" at any given point

the alternative: the site performance problems have been getting worse as the tables get bigger. having hexbear be frequently unavailable altogether seems worse than limiting functionality

the trade-offs. our experience has been that hexbear has been significantly faster the past couple weeks. of course, individual needs will vary, but on the whole, we expect that most users are ok with the tradeoff of hiding older posts for a smooth site experience--particularly given that this is not intended as a long term state of affairs.

If you have any feedback or concerns, you can comment on this post, or email Joseph Biden at joe@whitehouse.gov . If you know Rust or are familiar with the Diesel library, and want to help us get the long-term fix in, please reach out to:

Layla via Matrix or me via Matrix

DMs to our hexbear accounts are fine as well, @CARCOSA @layla