According to Robert Marchand:
> Yes all you are saying is true!  I was reluctant to test the snapshots 
> because I tought It would be trivial to pass from 3.1.5 to 3.1.6 and the 
> only reason I wanted to install 3.1.6 is for future security fixes who will 
> be I suppose for that version.  Everybody is happy with Ht://Dig here so we 
> don't need (as far as I know) any new features.
> 
> You know, even if I had tested with the snapshots, I'm not sure I would 
> have see the problem.  I found it because I replace the CGI on the live 
> server and It made a mess pretty quickly (the load was over 40).  The live 
> server has around 80000 documents and it's an old machine.  On the test 
> server (with 2000 documents), I didn't saw the difference at first.     The 
> test server is a workstation so I tought it was OK to be slow!

Well, it sounds like you did a lot more pre-release testing than I gave
you credit for.  Sorry about that, and thanks for the work you did.
In a way you're in the same boat as me, in that your test system is a
small site on a fairly slow computer, so it's hard to detect slowdowns
in the code for large collections.  I guess I was just venting some
steam over my frustration with the lack of help Geoff and I have had in
maintaining this code.  We need a good number of testers who'd be able
to try out new code on large sites, and really hammer away at it to find
problems before we release the code to everyone.

The irony in the lack of good solid testing we had in the pre-release is
that the final release ended up going out as pre-release quality, and that
essentially forces all users who are upgrading to become beta testers.
We still get the feedback we need, but it's a high-maintenance way of
getting it, because Geoff and I incur the overhead of putting together
yet another release, and the overhead of dealing with more duplicate
bug reports than we'd get with a more manageably sized group of testers
than the whole ht://Dig community.  3.1.6 was released less than a week
ago, and I've already been alerted to 3 problems in the documentation
(2 of which have been there since the stone age), 4 bugs (1 of which has
always been there, and another which has been reported twice in under
24 hours, i.e. the DEFS problem on SGI), and a potential memory leak or
other performance problem.

I think the wise course of action at this point would be to wait a
month or so until the bug reports slow to a trickle, then put together
a 3.1.7 release that will be strictly simple, well tested bug fixes and
no new features.

> I'm glad that "my" patch made it in the new version.  I also tought I 
> needed a "good case" before bringing a performance problem.

Well, you certainly did make a good case for this one, and that counts
for something.  Thinking back, there was an earlier report about a
slowdown of htsearch in 3.1.6, but the tests in that report suggested
it had more to do with the effects of disk caching than anything else.
I suggested some alternate tests to rule out these effects, but I never
heard back from that person, so I didn't have good reason to believe this
was anything new.  I think there may be a lot of potential bugs that
get discovered and reported, but never nailed down, because the only
people who seem to be able to reproduce them don't persevere enough in
their testing to actually isolate them to a good test case that we can
work with.

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/~grdetil
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Phone:  (204)789-3766
Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)   Fax:    (204)789-3930

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