Our data is released under various Creative Commons licenses.More information
If you love this content, please consider a donation.
Menu
** Disabled search and "Browse by language" **
As most of you know, in the past weeks the site has become slower and slower. From my investigations, the search feature and the "Browse by language" page are the most resource hungry, which is why those two features are currently disabled.
At the time I'm writing this, the website should no longer be slow, but at the cost of disabling two the of main features of Tatoeba, and I cannot guarantee these features will be back anytime soon.
I do have specific ideas of some changes that may improve the performance of the website, but I don't know if these changes will be enough. We may need to migrate to a new server. But before we consider this path, we have to try and see what can be optimized.
If you have strong programming knowledge and are reading this, and could help optimizing the website, please contact me. Or/and join our Gitter chatroom: https://gitter.im/Tatoeba/tatoeba2
Wow. Just so I'm clear, there's no longer a way for me to find sentence examples of specific words (in my case, mandarin ones) that I'm learning? Or is there some work-around I'm not seeing?
A possible workaround suggested by CK: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/sh...#message_27333
Other workaround (more complex to achieve), for anyone who has programming knowledge, is to develop your own website or software to search Tatoeba sentences, by using the data that we distribute https://tatoeba.org/eng/downloads
What kind of use are we expected to do of the website if it is not possible to find sentences? It might sound like a rhetoric question, but it is not, I am really curious how are we supposed to interact with tatoeba now.
Contributions. Like creating new sentences, translating sentences, proofreading sentences... These are still things you can do.
How can I translate sentences if I can't find them?
Maybe I am misunderstanding the site a lot, but what I used to do was to go to "navigate by language" find all the sentences in Polish that had no translation to Spanish, and start translating. That is impossible now. The only option is to wait on the main page and wait for a sentence in Polish to show up. So, how are we supposed to interact with the website if it is impossible to find any information?
And what would be the point of adding new sentences that nobody can find to translate?
You can start from the contributions instead. You can filter them by language:
https://tatoeba.org/eng/contributions/latest/pol
You can also browse by tags:
https://tatoeba.org/eng/tags/sh...with_tag/7/pol
Or browse sentences from a specific user:
https://tatoeba.org/eng/users/for_language/pol
It will for sure be more tedious to find sentences that are untranslated, but you can still find sentences this way.
Honestly, I prefer a slow website. What's the point of a fast website if missing the main feature of all Tatoeba?
+1
I did not find the website any slower than normal before the update, and I don't find it any faster now. All I see is that Search is gone. Perhaps it would be better to redirect Search queries to Google site search queries while this problem exists, because I legitimately do not understand how Tatoeba can be useful to anyone without Search.
Tatoeba is significantly faster for me now. However, without the ability to find sentences, Tatoeba is bereft of its main feature.
Well, if that tells you anything, the load average of the server was reaching up to 14, on Monday. The server was definitely suffering.
Tatoeba is not going to be useful at the moment. But this is a temporary measure. In the worst case, we'll have to move to a more powerful server. Well actually... in the worst case, Tatoeba will have to shut down. But I don't think the problems we are facing right now are too much to handle. It'll take a week, maybe two, to stabilize. Or, if we find out we need to move to another server, maybe a month. I can't say for sure, and I don't want to give false hope before things actually get solved.
In the meantime, for sure I will add the link to http://tatoeba.ueuo.com/google.html on the search error page. I personally didn't think about it before, so thanks to CK for the top.
Possibly this was contributing to the problem, but I really didn't mind opening other pages and having them load in the background while I browsed another. Searching this site by Google isn't even half as fast and organized as that.
The point is that contributors can still make contributions in decent conditions.
If you haven't seen it, CK suggested an alternative for searching sentences, it's a pretty decent alternative: http://tatoeba.ueuo.com/google.html
Since the google search site (http://tatoeba.ueuo.com/google.html) is so fast, a temporary fix could be having Tatoeba execute a search with the google search URL behind the scenes, then "screen-scrape" the returned page with awk, sed, regexp whatever to present the user with what he is normally used to seeing. Of course, we'd have to give up the ability to submit fancy search requests, but at least Tatoeba gets its search capability back to some extent.
We'd have to make sure it's okay with Google terms and conditions... which I don't think it would be okay. I think we use Google search, we have to redirect to their page.
Well, technically, you'll be using http://tatoeba.ueuo.com/google.html, not Google directly. The ueuo.com site has permission to use Google search I assume (or not, perhaps it is not necessary). It's like if you wrote your own web page and screen-scrape the info from stocks.yahoo.com. That's how sites like trivago.com and skyscanner.com get their info from other existing travel websites.
http://tatoeba.ueuo.com/google.html uses a script provided by Google.
We could reuse the same script, but we would need to display exactly what Google sends, including the ads. We can maybe change the CSS, but we cannot do the parsing of the content to present the sentences like they are usually displayed on Tatoeba.
The search is currently re-enabled.
I have possibly found the main source of the slowdown: https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1324
If things go well, we can keep the search enabled while taking care of the rest of the optimization.
The "Browse by language" page will remain disabled for now because there is an issue to fix about it: https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1323
thank you so much for your (and, obviously, of any other developer who helped) effort :)
The search offers almost all the functionality of the "browse by language" page.
For example: browse recent contributions in Spanish not translated into English:
https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...=&sort=created
It comes up with the last 1000 sentences, and it's reasonably fast.