[ic] UTF-8 Advantages/Disadvantages
Chris Keane
chris.keane at zzgi.com
Sat May 29 20:36:17 UTC 2010
>
> I do not think that you *have* to use UTF8, I think before it existed sites
> like yours have been working fine.
>
> I am afraid that the key for speeding up the loops at the moment, is to
> rewrite them.
>
Heh, I understand the issue at a technical level I'm sure you can
appreciate that from a release management perspective it's puzzling that
an "upgrade" would slow down established code by a factor of 10.
Some of the more critical items in our system, such as the race gridding
system (loops extensively) we've completely moved down into a usertag
(which speeds the process from ~60 seconds per race on 5.7.2, ~8 seconds
per race on 5.4, to ~2 seconds per race)
However, I'm sure I don't have to mention how eye-rolling it is to have
usertags that have HTML embedded in the code or loaded from our content
management system rather than being able to use ITL.
Makes me wonder at what point we should jettison Interchange altogether
because all our important code is written straight in perl! I suspect we
have one of the more customized and extensive systems written on
Interchange in existence and "rewriting all our loops" will be
problematic at best! We have our DB-backed CMS, CRM, kiosks, check-in
desks, race control, results management, e-commerce, reporting and
accounting systems, all ajax-ified. 7-8 years of development which would
be painful to revisit completely, especially with no assurance that the
"problem" can even be solved without rewriting in straight perl. I also
don't want us to be stuck in 5.4 land, or non-UTF-8 forever since we're
starting to sign non-english speaking clients.
As a long time proponent of Interchange I think the IC dev group does a
stellar job and I do understand the importance of UTF-8. I feel bad
offering criticism when in this case I haven't gone so far as digging
through the code myself to understand the challenges of the UTF-8
integration. I suspect that more and more IC users will bump their heads
into this one (look at Bill @ Bottlenose, for example), so if this was
my project I would have this upward-revision performance disaster fairly
high at the top of my critical problems list... but that's just me.
Regardless, I love you guys and I offer this entire comment in a spirit
of concerned interest.
If any of the core group need access to one of our test environments to
mess around with let me know.
Chris.
More information about the interchange-users
mailing list