"can we make it so that when a question is marked as 'answered' it disappears from the Top 8 questions section? Currently, it just drops down to the bottom, but if very few questions are being asked, it will come back up to the top. That was one UI thing I remember from last year. "
Performance is pretty poor right now - every refresh grabs ALL the data for every vote for every post from the DB, and runs an annoying calculation on it to sum up the scores. I'm seeing 30-50 RPS on that operation in AB. We can do better, and I think using memcached and caching the results of score calculations would work great. Invalidate on post events or vote events.
Tried this during the memory leak fixing drama, but it triggered some weird sorting issues. Re-test this upgrade problem now that the memory leak is fixed.
Long-running pages seem to be leaking all kinds of memory in the javascript VM. It probably has something to do with refreshing the datatable, but I haven't narrowed it down yet. BigTop (in apple developer tools) is a big help in checking for leaking.