Ratings problem?

[Smithy98]

Hi everyone, hope you're all fine.

I've noticed this for a few weeks now but I haven't had any chance to talk about it until now.

The number of ratings (for albums, artists, songs) don't seem to be up to date when looking at the 0-100 graph.

Will you look into this when you can?

Thanks.

[MadhattanJack]

Sorry to keep jumping into these Suggestions threads, but AFAIK it's always been like that — you're talking about the horizontal bar graphs that pop up when you hover the mouse over the little graph icon to the right of the "Average Rating:" line, down in the "Ratings" section, right? (Not the one in the top section.)

I believe those graphs are actually .PNG bitmap files, and they aren't calculated/generated on the fly. My guess would be that the server has to periodically make a separate .PNG file for every album on the site that has at least one rating, and it's probably a process scheduled for once a week or something. If it did it every few hours, or even every day, it would cause some sort of overall performance degradation. So if it's once a week, you end up with a "latency period" that can last several days, and it's more noticeable on more-recent (and more popular) albums/artists because those are the ones getting most of the ratings on any given day.

Admittedly, I could be totally wrong about all this.

[Smithy98]

[albummaster]

Graphs are cached for a short period (one day from memory) to prevent the server being overloaded (this was added a while back). Graphs are generated on each pageview if a cached graph doesn't already exist (or is out of date). It looks like stale graphs are not being replaced. I'll check into and see what's happening.

EDIT: Identified/fixed an issue and added cache times to graphs to make this a bit clearer (probably needs more tidying up when I get a chance).