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Pre-Cache Movies in Ranking Screen to Save Load Time
Could there be an option to pre-cache movies so that you can go quickly from one ranking to the next? It might be my sub-optimal internet, but I spend as much time waiting for the next movies to load as I do ranking them.
I’m impatient
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Inappropriate?On a regular "All Movies" filter matchup, it's taking approximately 300ms or less to get a new pair (during testing right now).
Caching is something we've considered but the issue is that each matchup is contingent on the last to some degree, so certain decisions would make caching moot, as the next cached matchup to show would be invalid based on previous choices - especially if you are marking films as unseen, or jumping around from filter to filter. The time to compute each cached matchup to be valid or not would be longer than it would to simply get a new pair.
That's how I understand it, anyhow. Jeremy (who is the programmer behind it) might have some better insight than I on why we don't (at least currently) implement caching on retrieving new matchups.
Out of curiosity, where are you accessing Flickchart from? Our servers are located in Tampa, FL, USA.
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I'm in Arkansas on Cox internet. Nothing loads instantly on it, but I think the Flickchart movie loading time could still be improved. Nonetheless, thanks for the explanation about why caching wouldn't work. -
Inappropriate?This is a really good question, and the answer is that there ARE some things we can do about it. We've been talking about them for a long time, but they took a back seat as we improved the overall speed of the site and they became less urgent for most users.
Our original idea was to grab, say, 10 matchups at once and send them all in a bundle, and then just save in the background and dish them out to you one a time. I'd still really like to do it, but there are a few considerations we have to account for:
1) Net speed is part of the wait time, but so is finding a good matchup. 10% of the time you may be waiting a few seconds as the site gets 10 at once.
2) Pre-fetching will increase load on the server -- if we grab 10 matchups for the user and they close the browser or change filters, the server's done the work of 9 more than it normally would have, with most of it being lost.
3) As Nathan said, since matchups affect each other, your choices may make the other cached ones redundant.
But they're not insurmountable problems. We might be able to automatically kick in pre-fetching only for users with slow connections, making #2 less of a problem, and we have a new algorithm coming that will make #3 a concern of the past. We'll see what we can do in the coming months.
Sorry to hear the site's slow for you. Thanks for letting us know -- it's always good to hear from the people who are still having problems, so we don't assume all is well with the world. :)
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That's why GetSatisfaction is so great!
What if, instead of precaching ten pairs, you just send one while a pair is up on the screen? It takes a solid second (or so) to download the pair, but it also takes at least one second to rank a pair. Ergo, what if a new one is loading while my brain is deliberating? That way, you discard the 'wasted download time' spent deliberating over a pairing. This would also cut down on problems #2 and #3. Heck, you could eliminate problem #3 by making the server not send two movies in a row (unless it's in some kind of mode where it's supposed to, i.e. an elimination mode).
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