Support

I am wondering if you might help me to understand the concept of root filters in JFilters.   On our server/site, we have been seeing occurrences 3-4 times a week of our site grinding to a halt for 5-10 minutes.  A consultant who has been analyzing our site in detail using New Relic identified JFilters queries as one of the things that might be triggering these events. In particular, our consultant identified an example of a JFilters query that executed 7 concurrent LEFT JOINs on the fvdd8_fields_values table and ran for over 100 seconds (although typically our filter results pages generally come back in 3-6 seconds).    Our server is a 12 core/16 GB VPS instance and we average about 125K unique visitors per day.   JFilters may or may not be a trigger for these incidents, but in any case I feel it is important that I know whether my JFilters configuration is reasonably optimized, as it is crucial to our site.   We now have 10 different categories of content we use jFilters for:

• https://www.cnvc.org/learn/events

• https://www.cnvc.org/learn/intensive-trainings

• https://www.cnvc.org/learn/research

• https://www.cnvc.org/trainers

• https://www.cnvc.org/trainers/emeritus

• https://www.cnvc.org/trainers/deceased

• https://www.cnvc.org/filter-results-pages/trainers-results/category/certified-trainer/roles/assessor (Assessors)

• https://www.cnvc.org/store

• https://www.cnvc.org/video-library

  With that in mind, can you help me answer the following:

1. What should my root filters look like? We currently have two root filters defined (which were set up for us by Marc Déchevre, and he suggested I contact you to ask about this); one for public users of type Categories with context Article and another for registered users of type Categories with context Contact.   Both are set to Listening, rather than Published.
2. Does it make sense that our root categories are both set to Listening rather than Published?  
3. Would you recommend that we enable the new v 1.20 root filter caching feature for any root filters?  Would you expect that to have much impact on performance?
4. Would you expect that the refactoring of underlying JFilters queries you did for version 1.20 to have much impact on performance and system load (we have not yet upgraded our production—we are on V1.18.3)?
5. Given our style of usage, are there any other best practices you would recommend or any bad practices to avoid?

Thanks!  This is a powerful product and amazingly useful, but it is not always clear how best to implent it.

Thanks Sakinho.  Those are helpful clarifications, and the link about limiting crawler access seems worth doing.  And I plan to install V1.20.1 today.

Can you clarify two more things? 

1. In the menu items that define our results pages, I see that we currently do not set the Primary Filter (see attached).

Is that something we should do?  If so, presumably we would select the root filter with public access with the context Article, correct?

2. Our consultant wrote the following: The database logs show the lockups are triggered by MySQL trying to sort thousands of records by Text Label (creating temporary tables on disk). If that Hidden Menu Item is currently configured to "Sort By: Label", please try changing the ordering to "ID" or "Article Manager Order". This should significantly speed up the operations since sorting by an ID (Number) is much faster for the database compared to sorting by Label (Text).

Only one of our results pages specifies sorting, and that sorts on the value of a custom date field.

Does his comment make any sense to you?

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