More information on the process that we use to calculate points.
Step 1) Every time a reply or mark as answers is done, we send a request into a queue. With the updates we just released yesterday we are hoping we can keep the queue length to average around 5 minutes.
Step 2) When we pull this request out of the queue we then perform the the point calculation for all posts in that thread. This means all users that participated in that post will get their recalculated for that post. This will log the data for this as it relates to that thread.
Step 3) In order for your points to show up for you we have to aggregate the point totals as it relates to the various threads into a total for the user. So we have another job that runs on a 15 minute interval that will perform this task.
Currently in my wishlist is to get steps 2 & 3 combined so that we can provide an audit trail of why you have the points you do and also optimizing the process so that we put a lot less load on our database servers as Steps 2 & 3 are currently the victims of deadlocks on a frequent basis. These deadlocks are the reason that points can take a while to show up. With the work we did on the release that was published yesterday (3/18/2010) we should stop seeing points not showing up at all.
