"Lag" (updated)

The main problem is we're maxing out cb's 768k uplink. I'm trying to tune things so it's less noticable but that only goes so far; the real solution is to get a fatter pipe, and that's not going to happen on Jan 1. I'll get things started on Monday; in the meantime, I'll be doing what I can, but like I said, there's no magic fairy dust to create bandwidth out of thin air.

Update: besides bandwidth crunch, cb2 was feeling the effects of many more than the usual number of people joining chat. Even after the improvements I made last time I poked my head into this code, checking for chatmail on chat entrance was a long query that made everything else related to the given user spinlock while it worked. This time, I created a materialized view on the chatmail so the users table isn't hit directly; unfortunately, I had to wipe out existing chatmail to do it. I think most people will agree this was a small price to pay.