Hello All,

As you might have noticed, I've turned off access to:

http://mojo
skazat
com/cgi-bin/dada/mail
cgi

(It's again up, may go down again soon)

This is because, as my webhost reports, Dada Mail is taking up too
many resources on the server I've been working pretty darn hard
trying to get Dada Mail optimized to use less resources There's also
been reports since we changed to the HTML::Template templates that
screens appear to draw slow and the entire interface is generally
sluggish No good

So, here's some things I've been working on:

(old stuff - 2 10 5+)

• Added safeguards against incorrect query strings/path info's
  returning an infinite loop of screens to web spiders, like Googlebot
• Found issue re: the File::Spec module/usage - basically, this
  module helps find the path to the HTML::Template templates, without
  having to explicitly set the path Sometimes it hangs Setting the,
  $ALTERNATIVE_TEMPLATE_PATH explicitly relieves this

(new stuff)

• Created a reusable program-wide SQL handle

  This should greatly reduce the amount of connections to the SQL
  server For example, if a Dada Mail install has four lists, the default
  screen of Dada Mail would make 4 connections to the SQL db - no good! Dada Mail will now only make 1 connection to the SQL server -yeah!

• Created a cache for screens created by Dada Mail that do not change
  frequently -

These screens include:

* The default screen
* The admin screen
* The list screen
* Every archive screen
* atom/rss feed screens

This should also greatly reduce both the connections to the SQL
server (if the screen is cached, NO connection would be needed) and the amount of CPU time needed by Dada Mail to render the pages
Things like parsing the saved email templates take a lot of juice to
do Since these screens could be pre-rendered, the only thing Dada
Mail would do is fetch the data from a file and present it to the
client Now that this is in place, it seems amazingly wasteful how I
was doing this before

So, all these changes are Good Things - the Caching Scheme is an
option you can turn on/off - having it off will make the program run
exactly it did before The shared SQL handle is just a smarter way of
doing things What I think was happening in my case was that I was
flooding the SQL server with connection requests, and the program was
just hanging waiting for them

I'm currently testing these new features and once all the kinks are
out, I'll release is as 2 10 6 I really really want to get going
on to some more interesting features in Dada Mail, but I need to also
make sure Dada Mail continues to be a good server citizen For
example, the default screen in Dada Mail:

http://mojo
skazat
com/cgi-bin/dada/mail
cgi

Snaps almost immediately, instead of having to wait for the page to
load up A pretty noticeable difference I'm excited

Cheers,