Is it just me, or does the Board’s server seem (once again) to have been working even slower the past couple of weeks? Even really late at night (by American time zones). I’m even getting “Cannot Find Server” messages lately, much more often than the incidence to which I’ve grown accustomed. Why is this?
Because we have more visitors these days, we’re really popular right now. It’s a finite amount of resources with more users trying to get their piece of the SD pie. So everybody else’s piece is a little smaller and there’s not always enough to go around.
Sorry.
TubaDiva
Interesting. News to me. Any idea why?
This is the third such thread I have posted in, and against all odds, I am determined to get an answer this time.
Forgive me if I am pointed and not satisfied with non answer tripe, but I’ve asked and watched others ask and we never seem to get a satisfactory answer, so this is my last shot at getting a true explanation.
With all due respect, and not to offend, this is what I’ve heard in the past. As best I can understand, it goes like this;
The board is like a 1000 seat restaurant with only enough cutlery for 500.
Any inquiry about why service is slow or poor is answered with the disingenious, “Well, we bought a couple of dozen more pieces of cutlery, but found that demand just rose to meet it, garsh what can we do?”
Followed by the ever popular, “We recommend you come back when you’re not hungry, have a nice day now!” :rolleyes:
While they can’t provide enough band width for the board to run smoothly or consistently, they seem to have enough band width to accomodate an advert on every page. Colour me confused.
This has to be the most unlikely business model I have ever heard of, and while I find it unlikely I’m going to get one, I’m just naive enough still to believe if the right question is asked maybe an understandable explanation will be forthcoming.
So I’m asking. Not to offend, but to inform. Your customers are frustrated, can you hear us?
I’ve never seen any indication that we don’t have enough bandwidth. What we do lack is server time. Going through the database of posts and constructing a thread from them requires processing power. It’s not much for any given thread, but this board gets a lot of thread views, and they all add up. Plus, of course, whatever’s spent on searching, posting, moderatorial acts, etc. This is the bottleneck.
The Google ads do not go through this bottleneck, however. There is a lot of processing needed to construct those, too (probably more than for the board itself, in fact), but that’s all done by Google’s servers, and so does not directly affect us. And I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that Google has better servers than we do, and are likely to continue to have better servers than us for the forseeable future.
This phenomenon happens a few times a year. Here’s why. In this case (and you may have seen it in the day-after-Thanksgiving news,) many bigbox stores sold a lot of computers at big discounts in late November. It also happens in early January and when the new university students move in with their new computers. Every one of those new boxes comes with a free AOL CD. So, suddenly, a crowd of newbies start crawling all the cool sites on the web. We’re one of the coolest sites, so they surf here.
Conversely, for a few days right around Christmas and New Year’s Eve, cybernauts are much too busy to sit down in front of the computer, so this board will seem deserted. Someone will start a thread to ask, “Where is everybody?”
So true. 
I don’t know much about computers but, how is it bigger forums with more users, more posts, more viewers, don’t seem to have these problems? It’s strange especially considering most of the forums I’m thinking of don’t have subscriptions either.
I have to agree with what other posters have said about the speed and accessibility of these boards. Despite the explanations of computer sales and new students creating bottlenecks at certain times of the year, I have found the poor performance of these boards to be a year-round phenomenon.
The message board went to subscriptions and then turned to advertising but things could be a lot better. What’s next? Are we going to see “Shoot the Duck & Win Twenty Dollars” ads?
I’m certainly not the person to give you the definitive answer, but we do this explanation quite frequently.
It has to do with “page views” if I remember. If not, I’m sure someone will be along to correct me.
Sure, there’s boards out there with more active posters, but I don’t think they constantly call up page views. They post more like people talking on a phone, you just say what you want and go on to the next thing. I know that’s not the way to really explain it, but it’s my understanding.
I’ll try to find a link to the last time this was brought up.
tuba’s explanation in this thread explains it some.
Respectfully I would like to point out the date of that post is March 2005 and contains the phrase “We’re working on it, please be patient”.
I believe we have been patient.
And it basically seems to amount to, as I alluded originally, “still don’t have enough cutlery, come back when you’re not hungry”.
Was our board behaviour so unpredicatable that they could not forsee (when they took our money) that they would not be able to provide for the demand our numbers would make on the server(s)?
I’m more than willing to admit I’m not very computer savy. But it doesn’t seem a very workable model to me, after all, more subscriptions will only cause more demand and slow things further.
So much for naivete, I recognise now you’re not going to stray from this standard, and stale explanation.
I can’t help wondering how many threads there have been since March 2005 with this same inquiry. And the same standard, garsh darn answer.
As frustrating as spotty board response is, it’s not nearly as frustrating as the feeling that no one is listening to what the community is trying to express.
Could you list a few examples? Not all that many boards are bigger than this one, and of those that are, I suspect there’s a different explanation in each case for how they’re able to get by.
I’m on the board quite a bit so i feel qualified to comment. The board temporarily locks or “jams” quite often and refuses to accept posts or bring up new or refreshed threads . The timing for these events is more often during the day but I have seen it late at night and even in the early morning hours.
I always assume it’s taking care of some internal house keeping issue, but I do have to tell you that relative to large (some larger than SDMB) paid boards out there which I visit regularly this board’s system response performance is by far the worst re jamming. It’s almost embarrassing.
I have no clue whether it’s an issue of bandwidth, hardware or what but it’s kind of absurd at this point with a paid board to put up with this “Bob’s Bit Bucket” style of performance.
Here’s one that I visit with over 100,000 members.
I’m not very computer savvy but here are a few comments on the board:
Like the SDMB I’m sure not all members are active.
When I checked at noon GMT there were just over 800 on the site. Most users at one time was approx. 1600.
You can’t use the quote function.
Any one can search.
I think it uses the same software as this board but an earlier version.
There is a certain amount of advertising but it seems quite discrete.
It’s free but you can subscribe for a “Personal Title”.
It has a chat room (although I’ve never been in it)
It has private messaging enabled.
It has 1,200,000 views per day.
I don’t know if this is a valid comparison or not but you asked for examples.
On a personal level I’ve noticed a marked deterioration of board performance from early afternoon onwards (GMT). Lots of timing out, whether that’s a function of my browser (Firefox) or these boards I don’t know, but it only usually happens here.
Several posters, myself included, have spent time trying piece together the information that we have to see where the board bottlenecks are.
So I’d like to thanks those that answered the question in this thread, it appears that the SD server isn’t fast enough to keep up at peak times.
Can I ask a few questions: What are we running the boards on ? I.e. what are the server(s) specs ? How about some idea of page views per day ? posts per day ( Hmm, Big Boards says 25935 posts last week, so 3700 odd a day ) ?
I know from past experience that you’ll not reveal the financial details of the server/hosting package but can you give me some idea if it’s costing more than the subscriptions bring in ? less ? about even ? I’d also like to know how the Google ads are working out but I suspect that even if you were inclined to share that it’d be against the AdWords policy.
Are there plans to buy a new/better server ? Are you actively looking into the board speed issue or is it something that we just have to live with (that’s not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes the time/money isn’t there to fix it).
I’m asking this because we’re a community with a broad knowledge base and we’re the sort of people that can come up with unusual solutions. And we’re the sort of community that’s intelligent enough to realise when there are no solutions. But to do that well we need more information, otherwise you’ll get these repeated threads which will fill with idle speculation.
Couple of final points: Chronos the Big Boards link above shows the SDMB as 60th overall in board size and around 180th ranked by posts last week. So that should give you a good sample of boards that are bigger than us. I’ll also happily accept that the majority of them have methods of support not available/useful to us (horrible adverts etc).
And whilst the you’re right that the Google ads are not constructed on the SDMB server they do have an indirect effect as Google has to periodically read the board to work out what ads to target. I doubt that’s much more than a drop in the ocean compared to the normal viewing activity but I want to be complete about these things.
SD
Under the circumstances that prevail, just what exactly do you propose I do here?
TubaDiva
You might consider having a web specialist consultant come in and spend a little time tuning the server and/or discussing ways of improving performance. At the very least such a consultant could give you a detailed technical report on why the performance can’t be improved, and you could post that report for us technically inclined dopers to read.
Just a thought.
You might tell the community you hear their frustration and tell them whether they are naive to expect improvement.
If it’s only going to get worse as more people join, which would seem to be the case, then tell us so. We’ll stop bugging you about it.
I’m not sure if you’re responding to all of us, just me, or someone else but I’ll answer just in case you meant me.
I think we want an honest view of the situation (as elbows said), and we all know that whatever the answer is there’ll be some discussion, some moaning, some suggesting etc. But at least we’ll have an a view of where we are and where we might be going.
Ponder Stibbons suggests a specialist, I’m suggesting that you take advantage of the specialists on this very board by at least posting some of the basic usage/server stats.
I don’t think we’re asking you personally to go out and make everything right, but something like “Yeah we know there are problems but frankly they’re unlikely to get fixed because of X, Y, and Z” or “We don’t really think there are any problems, please tell us if you disagree” or “There’s a new server being added next week” is all we’re looking for.
SD