November 6, 2006

8:54 PM

This huge thread kills Safari/OmniWeb. I'd like there to be a preference that allows me to see massive posts broken up by 100s of comments or something. Alternatively, is there a different CSS file that can be loaded for these that will keep Safari/OmniWeb from crashing?
posted by onalark to feature requests at 8:54 PM (17 comments total)

I'm running a MacBook with 2 GB of RAM and it loads fine in FireFox but crashes in both Safari and OmniWeb.
posted by onalark at 8:55 PM on November 6, 2006

Works OK for me on Safari. 10.4.8 dual G5 with 3.5 GB of RAM. Maybe there's a memory leak?
posted by doctor_negative at 9:14 PM on November 6, 2006

Crashes or just takes a long time? It loads for me in Safari, but after the entire thing has been received, it beachballs for a good 20 seconds or so doing a final layout. Same thing when I navigate off the page.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 9:21 PM on November 6, 2006

Macbook w/ 1 gig of ram, works fine. Takes a few seconds, but no beach ball after.
posted by justgary at 9:23 PM on November 6, 2006

I have a PowerBook G4/800, 768 MB RAM, and the page loads (if slowly).
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:24 PM on November 6, 2006

I wish everyone's browsers choked on that thread.
posted by smackfu at 9:25 PM on November 6, 2006

Yep, my mad-tab rush is what was causing this (not a crash but a process lock, should have been more specific, sorry). I was working from the 24 Hour favorites page and snapping up a few of the popular comments at a time, which was enough to send OmniWeb spinning for a minute. Looking at the process in top, it appears to be fine memory-wise but does the aforementioned lock for as long as 30 seconds if loading a single view of the page. I'm not patient enough to see if it will eventually load multiple tabs simultaneously.
posted by onalark at 9:33 PM on November 6, 2006

FWIW I filed this as a feature request because I still think breaking up (or having the option to break up) massive posts into multiple pages would be A Good Thing.
posted by onalark at 9:34 PM on November 6, 2006

would you still have the comment box at the bottom of every page, or would it only be on the last one?
posted by carsonb at 9:41 PM on November 6, 2006

nevermind.
posted by carsonb at 9:42 PM on November 6, 2006

It seems to me like the real feature request should be to the Safari devs to have the page layout of one tab not bring the whole app to its knees.

Doing pagination at the server end seems to be non-trivial, as you can see from the number of buglets in e.g. viewing favorites. I'd much rather have to wait 20 seconds here and there for the occasional render of the very rare large thread then to be forced to put up with wonky page numbering. Plius with the current Mefi slowness during the US work-day it seems like the response time is dipping into the dozens of seconds already and having to wait that long to paginate through threads would suck hard.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:12 PM on November 6, 2006

"It seems to me like the real feature request should be to the Safari devs to have the page layout of one tab not bring the whole app to its knees."

Amen, brother! Though IME, the thread in question has been slow-loading but better than some in Safari.
posted by litlnemo at 10:22 PM on November 6, 2006

Damn, that thread just won't stop breeding.
posted by mediareport at 11:33 PM on November 6, 2006

It choked a little for me, too. Powerbook 1.5 GHz, 10.4.8, but it eventually loaded up OK.

I think a standard server side toggle to textify or lofi a thread after it reaches a certain size is a good idea. I mean, I pity the mobile phone user. [An aside, one wonders if mobi.metafilter.com would be useful, or a standard lofi.metafilter.com that aggregates all the content in one place with a small bandwidth/size footprint.]

Pagination is another option, but it's the poor man's version of threaded comments.
posted by gsb at 1:28 AM on November 7, 2006

Well it tried it on my mobile phone and it worked amazingly. It took me 5 minutes to scroll all the way to the bottom though.
posted by bigmusic at 4:26 AM on November 7, 2006

Arg. Whatever you do, don't open that thread if you're working in AutoCad.
posted by koeselitz at 8:54 AM on November 7, 2006

Everyone chokes on Ted Haggart's post the first few times. Ask Michael Forest Jones.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:22 AM on November 7, 2006 [1 favorite]