I know the site runs much quicker now that The Era Of Subscriptions has begun but there are still heavy load times. I have a thought about how we can all help out just a little. We all probably have our own little way of scanning the forums, my method is to start at the Pit and work up (MPSIMS, IMHO. . .) I save myself the trouble of going to http://boards.straightdope.com and instead type in my address bar “boa” and stop. My URL history is presented in a dropdown and I just tab to “http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=5” because I know that’s the Pit. After I’m done with the Pit I used the forum jump dropdown at the bottom of the page to go to MPSIMS. Etc.
I got to thinking, if everyone did that, it sure would help speed things up. The server wouldn’t have to serve up that front page with the counts and the last post and all that stuff. Unfortunately, not that many people go to ATMB and read the threads so even if only 100 posters read this, it wouldn’t help that much, you’d have to get everybody to do it.
According to the mods, the main problem has always been bandwidth, not computing power. In other words, what kills the system is all of us trying to download many pages of actual content at once - not the search for the content. The front page is relatively short, so I suspect that circumventing it, while every little bit helps, doesn’t help much.
I suppose asking people to change their profile to display, say, 25 posts per page could conceivably cut down on bandwidth somewhat - but you’d probably get more DB hits, and at some point computing power would take over as the dominating factor.
Bottom line - if The Reader ever makes enough money of this board to make it worthwhile to upgrade the hardware again, I suppose they will. As long as that is not the case, I guess we’ll just have to suffer quietly (well, OK, I guess we can keep making some noise about it… :p)
I think you’re mistaken. As long as I’ve been here, the limiting factor was CPU. More recently, the bandwidth came into play as the SDMB started eating more into the ChiReader’s pipe.
Not only are the hamsters overworked, now their little yellow tubes are narrowing.