Me too, but that’s because I’ve been up all night studying. Oops, back to work! I wish I could sleep until mid-afternoon like you night owl 
GomiBoy, your estimations appear far too high. The entire SDMB active database is somewhere between 2 & 10 GB from what I recall of prior comments by Jerry.
The board has 8,138,595 posts. The average would 500 characters plus links. Call it 2K per post. That would be approximately an uncompressed 16gigs. The Data is stored in compressed text format, including the tags. The lack on any stored graphics in the database allows it to remain small.
You might recall that Jerry regularly archives older threads. I would guess that 10 Gigs his current limit in size until he gets a chance to move us to a new version. This might not be a limit of the version we are on, but rather just the MySql setup.
Most of our problems appear to be from a beat up old database being accessed by an obsolete version of vBulletin. The vBulletin message board had threads about tuning the newer versions of vBulletin to fix search problems like we have.
Additionally, the SDMB has problem with general searches. The New Post search is only a small resource hit as it was only checking recent posts. These are fast searches.
**I hope this detail estimate helps clear this argument up a bit. **
Disclaimer: IT Pro, Programmer/Analyst and Database design but no working knowledge of vBulletin
Jim
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
FUCKITY FUCKING FUCKNESS, FUCKING FUCKERS
I want my fucking “New Posts” button back.
OK, may have over-estimated. Still don’t think the Dope is run at a profit, though.
I think it is run at a small profit now, but not enough to really matter yet to the bottom line. I think Creative Loafing has plans to actually improve profitability and performance of the Dope. It is quite possible. Of course they could just avoid the headache and shut it down instead, but I doubt that will happen.
I think it probably was run at a lost for years, probably up until the Google Ads were added.
Jim
Of course I can’t search so I can’t find any of my old posts but I’ve done some number crunching in the past to work out database size/bandwidth. I think What Exit? is roughly right.
To be honest I no longer give much of a damn about this, and while I’d like to believe big changes are on the horizon the mods have to accept that they’ve already cried that wolf. We’ve been promising this, that and the other for years.
This board could run better, but Jerry (and the other PTB) don’t have the time or money to make it so. There have been enough offers of help, money, hardware and expertise over the years but they’ve all been turned down. Hopefully the new owners will see that there’s a reservoir of free help out here just waiting to be drawn on.
GomiBoy: From my previous number crunching and some investigation I don’t believe this board currently runs at a profit (it may about break even), I firmly believe that it could make money and there was a great thread in ATMB a few years ago where we explored different ways to make that happen. It’s a shame I can’t search for it.
What Exit?: I agree, I don’t think we’re likely to be shut down. The worst that’ll happen is they’ll try and ring out profit from the board in the worst possible way (think screaming banners and ads between pages). Hopefully CL have more sense.
If it’s a labor of love, they sure have a funny way of showing it. I could do without that kind of “love”.
Funny thing is, I’d just popped in to search on donkey balls.
30,000 post and member since 2000 and you hate it here?
Buddy, for years now the steps I take are CTRL-A, then CTRL-C before I hit Preview or Post. All it takes is one time, like you’ve experienced, to make a person gun shy.
Someday I’d love to visit your world, where all is black or white.
Bring your crayons when you do, that oughta really piss off the natives!
I’ve honestly got to say - and I promise I’m not saying this to be a jerk - I’ve hardly ever experienced the slightest difficulty with the board. The pages almost always load immediately, and on those rare occasions when I’ve found the site to be down it’s generally restored itself quickly. Very occasionally, I find the search function to be a little sluggish. That’s about my only complaint, and it’s hardly a complaint at all. I’m not saying everyone else is making a big fuss over nothing but I’m rather curious as to why I appear to be exempt from all the technical hiccups which seem to plague everybody else. I’m guessing it has something to do with my location. Would anyone be able to enlighten me?
Luck of the draw, I imagine. How much time would you say you spend actively browsing the board?
The problems I experience are very intermittent in nature; the board either works perfectly, or it doesn’t work at all (timeouts and server crashes). If I didn’t browse the forums more than a couple times a week, I can easily see where I might not notice any trouble.
I browse most days, although usually not for longer than 15-20 minutes.
Those are the same problems I have. Am I pissed? I think I’m entitled (ooh there’s that word) to be a tad irked, but I’m not. My more dominant emotion is fear that this board will disappear. I really like it here and would feel like a little part of me died without being part of the intercourse…err… discourse here.
If it means you are using the boards at off-peak times, then perhaps your location is making a difference for you simply by virtue of being logged in when the servers have the least activity to cope with.
There are a myriad of other factors that contribute to the performance that you notice. If you access the Dope once a day, during an off-peak time, for less than half an hour, on a slow computer, with a slow internet connection then you’ll be far less likely to notice problems than someone who accesses the boards more frequently, for longer periods, during times of peak usage, on a faster machine, with a faster internet connection. There’s also a matter of expectation - you experience outages periodically but - in your opinion - not excessively, and you don’t seem to mind when this happens. Someone else might have higher expectations of service and consider it a bigger deal. Personally, I’ve encountered multiple instances this week where I couldn’t access the boards at all. I simply wandered off and did something else, but I do consider that to be a lot of downtime for one site in one short week and I can see why it would annoy some. I access free sites on a daily basis that are rarely unavailable - irrelevant to large portions of this conversation as they are not message boards and therefore are dealing with a different sort of load - but inevitably the comparison will be made and the SDMB will look bad in comparison.
There’s no debate about whether or not the problems exist; they do. You’ve just been fortunate enough to be largely unaffected by them. Whether that’s because you’re lucky, or because you’re a light user of the site, or you have different expectations of service, is impossible to say.
Thanks for the explanations. I do have a fast connection, but I don’t have big expectations of the service and probably do access the board during off peak times. That may well explain how my surfing is relatively hassle free.
But maybe it’s just cos I’m awesome…
I just googled the e-mail adress of the Reader and sent them a letter of complaint. If nothing else, at least it made ME feel better.
Wasn’t there supposed to be an update yesterday?