Allow reader to choose number of comments/page

[cos]

Title
Allow reader to choose number of comments/page

Short, concise description of the idea
Add a pulldown menu on any post with more than one page of comments, allowing reader to view a larger or smaller number of comments per page.

Full description of the ideaCurrently, if there are more than 50 comments on a post, and more than 25 top-level

Comments

[snakeling]

Tentative +1: As long as LJ doesn't grind to a halt every time someone opens some comment-heavy post, *and* a higher number can't be made default, as suggested in paragraph 5, I'm okay.

[charliemc]

Agreed.

I like the idea, but worry about the load...

[ex_uniquewo]

+1

This could be a new Plus/Paid or Paid benefit.

[worldserpent]

Isn't this going to cause load problems?

[cos]

Umm, maybe, maybe not? I did address it in the suggestion, in several places. If it's going to be implement, LJ could figure out if it could be made to work, or would be too costly. But what are you asking, beyond what I already addressed in the suggestion?

[worldserpent]

Well, what I'm saying is that the folks who are most likely to use it are those on the massive communities that always have tons of comments and tons of readers, and there are already, IIRC load problems related to that.

[xnera]

I'm not an expert on the LJ code/database by any means; I only have a rough idea of how it works. But from my understanding of the limited knowledge I have, this would indeed cause load issues.

memcached stores frequently-requested queries & their results in cache so there's less database hit. So on popular communities/entries (say, the latest news post), the "25-top level comments" pages are stored in cache, so anybody hitting that page will have it served up from cache rather than querying the database again. If you had the option to change the comments per page, there would have to be multiple versions of the comment pages cached, each with different # of comments posted. This would increase the load as there'd be more searching required just to find the proper cached page, rather than serving up the current top-25 version.

For this reason, I'm against this suggestion. It does sound like it'd be nice, but I think there'd be too much of a load increase.

[nakeisha]

Assuming all the technical things are okay and LJ will know that, I like this idea.

[7rin]

Read the above - I say give it a shot.