Anthere,
 
I believe that your idea about your watch list could be programmed very easily. Also, it will improve performance -- at least for you. Especially, if you are using a slow connection, like 5 KB / second.
 
Why should you have to wait 1 minute and 20 seconds, for something that could reach you in 10 seconds?
 
Brion, could we add a clause like this?
 
   WHERE (today - timestamp) < 3 days? /* I know this is not correct syntax */
 
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthere [mailto:anthere5@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 5:48 AM
To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Watch list and performance issues

Would it not be interesting to slightly change the way the watch list is working ?

That's a very important tool on the en.wiki

1) to follow-up articles one is interested in

It can hardly be done with recent changes now; too many articles modifications everyday.

But in the watch list feature, what is really interesting - imho - is the watch of the most recent articles modified.

2) to a lesser extent to find back some articles one want to go back one day

but this can also be done with the search, or by adding links on personal pages

My watch list is hideously big. Each time I click on watch list, my next move is to click on the *stop loading* button after a small bunch of seconds. Just display the last 3/7 days of watched articles. 99% of the time, that's *all* what is needed. Why should one wait for the whole watch list to be downloaded ? Why should one impose extra useless burden to the server ?

How much of server time does the watch list query take anyway ?

How much of the client time does it take to load 400 kb of data, when only 50k are really needed ?

Why should not a persistent and repetitive human habit be automated ?

I'd like to see at the top of the watch list something like

- display the articles I follow which were modified in the past 3 days

- display the articles I follow which were modified in the past 14 days

- display all the articles I follow

With a default at 3 days for example.

It is not that this is *really* needed by humans, though it would be nice. But could it help performance ?


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