Hi Samuel - this issue is still happening, and it seems like it’s gotten more frequent in the last several days. Refreshing the screen resolves the issue - sort of. I mean that it corrects some counts (more than just the feed I’m viewing), but not all of them. I know that sometime in the last 24 hours I’ve done a refresh, and this morning I found two feeds showing no new stories in the sidebar, but when I select that feed there’s a new story from prior (in these two cases, from 8/27). Also, the “Last Updated” indicator shows a more recent interval than the date/time on the story.
Finally, I’m also seeing something which may be a variation of this problem or may be a new issue. Just in the past three days I’ve come across three different feeds that have a new story (not previously seen by me), but neither the sidebar nor the story pane show any unread items. Let me know if this is an unrelated issue and I’l start a new topic for it.
Hmm, I’m going to be working on the database later this week, which should work to solve these issues. This problem is almost certainly due to slave lag, which means new stories aren’t propagating out fast enough, so unread counts are “low”.
There is a solution which forces a recount of every story. I may actually build that, since it would certainly solve the issue nicely. If this keeps up, I’ll just build that background task to fire when you login after being away from longer than 1 hour.
I thought I’d put up a screen print of the problem, in case that would be helpful. The part that isn’t clear to me is how there could be a 36 + hour slave lag, but it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that I just don’t understand the process well enough. Thanks for continuing to work on this issue!
(Sorry for the green overcast on that image - I have no idea why it’s there. My actual screen does not have that, of course.)
36+ hours is totally possible, because the unread story recount happens immediately in most cases, and then the subscription is marked as clean. Once its clean (unreads are counted), it doesn’t get flipped to dirty until there are *new* stories, even if the feed is being fetched regularly. Once a new story comes in, it flips all subscriptions to dirty, then spends 10 seconds counting for each subscription. When 10 seconds are up, the users who haven’t been counted will have to count the stories next time they log back on. That’s why there’s a flash about 10 seconds after you login. Those feeds, for the most part, are the ones with lots and lots of users subscribed, which means you may not be at the top of the list when it comes time to count the stories for users.
I’m pushing fixes out left and right, though, in prep for Tuesday’s iPad launch, so keep an eye out. This may get fixed soon enough.
I’m sorry to keep going on about this issue, but I feel like it’s gotten more prominent over the past few days, so I ran a check. Yesterday morning I made sure that every count in two of my folders was correct. This morning I checked all the feeds and this is what I found:
Folder 1: 37 feeds, 7 feeds with new stories, 2 correctly counted, 5 with incorrect counts.
Folder 2: 145 feeds, 19 feeds with new stories, 9 correctly counted, 10 with incorrect counts.
Any thoughts on when this might really get fixed? (An rss reader that doesn’t correctly show new stories isn’t really that helpful.)
Interestingly enough: just after I posted this, I went back to my open NewsBlur window and all counts had been correctly updated. I did not log out/in, or refresh the screen. Backstage magic? Any action I can take to make that happen (for all feeds at once) at will? I wouldn’t mind doing something just before I started reading feeds, if it would handle all the feeds at once.
I think I know what the issue is. It’s that your refresh_feeds interval is crapping out for some reason. Now, how it restarted I have no idea. Anyway, try refreshing the window and see if any feeds flash yellow. If they do, then refresh_feeds are broken. (One or two are allowed to flash, but if many more do, then it means they aren’t getting regularly updated)
Woops, removed previous entry in error! It went something like this:
When I tried refreshing last night, it seemed to correct the problem. This morning, the first incorrectly counted feed I came across I refreshed the window. No change. I tried Shift+refresh. No change. I logged out and back in. That corrected the count for the feed I was looking at but not for all feeds, as I pretty immediately came across another feed that showed 1 unread in the sidebar and two unread in the story list. The new story on that feed was posted last night at 9pm. Also found another feed that didn’t correct in the refresh /re-log in. Thoughts/suggestions? Option to insta-fetch all feeds at once?
Again this evening, more than half my feeds that should be showing new stories in the sidebar are not. Refreshing the window does not fix them all (or even most of them). I see that there’s also another topic with people having the same problem. Any idea when it might be fixed?
(That topic was actually started before this one. I just didn’t see it when I first noticed the problem.)
Hmm, I suspect something else may be at work here, since all of my feeds are correct. Do you use any other platforms? Personally, I use all three (Android, iPad/iPhone, and web), so I should probably suffer with the greatest amount of variability, but I see nothing wrong.
Nope - just web (Firefox 15) on one desktop linux box. I’m pasting in a few screen shots of the problem - taken a minute or two ago, just to be sure I’ve explained myself re: what’s actually happening. In these examples, the count is non-zero and also incorrect, but this happens with equal frequency when the count in the sidebar is 0 and the story pane shows 1.
Here are three more examples where the count is 0 in the sidebar and correctly 1 in the story list (also from just now - 11:42pm Sept 11). I guess I’m hoping that you may see something that I’ve failed to notice or convey.
This has been happening to me as well. If I refresh the page, it corrects the count for the feed I’m on, but not the others. Logging out/in doesn’t fix it. It seems that the counts are off by one (stories with 2 feeds show 1, stories with 1 feed don’t show any new ones, etc.) but I may be wrong about that.
Not sure if they’re related, but I started seeing this after the “mark all as read” issue was fixed,
I was able to determine this morning that when I refresh the window, the unread story count is only updated for feeds I’ve (just) recently looked at.
I got up this morning, looked at 3 or 4 feeds; two of them had uncounted unread stories. I refreshed the window and the unread count corrected for *those two* feeds. I kept reading and soon found two more feeds with uncounted unread stories. When I refreshed the window, again the unread count corrected just for those two feeds. Maybe this will help pinpoint what is going wrong, or how to fix it?
Now that I’m aware of this problem, I’ve noticed that more than half of all my feeds indicating 1 Unread item in the Feed list actually have a second unread item in the feed’s story view. The second item’s timestamp will range from 1 day to almost 2 weeks old, so it’s almost certainly something the RSS scraper found a long time ago–not just a matter of short-term DB sync.
This issue is pretty major for me. I hope it can be isolated soon!
Yup, the issue has been isolated. I posted some details in the other thread (https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/…) but to recap, I’ll be moving to a new database technology soon so that this won’t happen anymore. But I resolved the replica lag by replacing my replicas with faster machines. It’s a stop gap, but a pretty good stop gap.
I also have a graph where I can measure replica lag. It’s at 0 right now, which is where it should always be.
