[EN] A thought on Steemit delay problem

Hello, this is @joviansummer(witness: @jswit). As many of you already know, when you write a post/reply on Steemit, often it doesn't show up immediately. It takes from a few minutes to half an hour to show up.

According to @ety001's post here, the cause of the problem seems to be Hivemind database overload. Hivemind is based on Python and PostgreSQL, and provides community functions for Steemit.

Other services forked from STEEM(such as HIVE and BLURT) also use their own versions of Hivemind. But it seems they don't have the delay problem of Steemit. We could think about a few hypothetical reasons why:

• They get far less traffic, and database is not overloaded. (BLURT may have smaller user base, but I'm not sure about HIVE.)

• Their hivemind codes are more optimized, so that their versions of hivemind is more resilient to large traffic.

• They are imposing more strict security policy for their services. Incoming traffic is regulated to prevent database overload.

• They are using more recent versions of Python and PostgreSQL. Performance might get better with updated versions.

I might be wrong, but in my opinion, the first thing to do is imposing more strict rate limit and IP address filter via hosting service providers(AWS/Cloudflare)' security features, rather than modifying Hivemind codes. The second thing to do is to check if Hivemind can perform better with more recent versions of Python and PostgreSQL

Actual Hivemind code revision should be the last resort, if these measures don't solve the problem. Of course code revision could help, but I think it will take much more time and effort. I think it should be considered as a long-term issue.

I don't know, but Steemit tech team might be already doing some or all of the above. I just hope this delay problem will be fixed soon. Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful day!