Yeah, it’s a done deal. They’re looking for however they can find to reduce the amount of bandwidth the board sucks up, especially as it’s impinging on the stuff the Reader gets paid for.
I’m sorry for your inconvenience.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Does anyone know if there’s a browser setting that can be reset to reduce waiting times? I get the same 8080 port problem here at work. When I use Netscape, pages take forever and a day to load. However, when I’m browsing with IE, BAM! page loads right away. I have no idea if the difference is inherent in the software, or if some setting is different between the two.
Well if the done deal is to mess up how the board looks like for a lot of it’s users, that’s a shame.
Oh well. Suppose I better start getting used to it.
Thanks, TubaDiva.
I hope I’m not veering too close to BBQ territory if I shake my tiny fist at the SDMB and reluctantly stop coming here. 
Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly “sucks up” bandwidth? Could the older threads be purged to reduce bandwidth?
Hey, the graphics are back. I should shake my tiny fist on a regular basis. 
Thanks to whomever changed it back. I hope you can keep it this way and still find a way to manage your bandwidth.
Careful, you’ll go blind.
Maybe it’s a sign that God doesn’t want us surfing the Dope at work…
Then why do they give us computers?
The primary thing that sucks up bandwidth is views. Viewing threads. Old threads have no impact whatsoever on bandwidth use. 1,000,000 hits per day on a new thread is the same as 1,000,000 hits per day on an old thread if the thread sizes are the same.
Old threads take up database space (hard disk space) and add to the CPU load for such actions as Searches.
I’d like to humbly put forward again a suggestion to quickly reduce the number of views the Board sees. One that can be implemented within a minute or two and un-implemented within the same time if it doesn’t help, and can be done from the Admin Control Panel.
Make the BBQ Pit, MPSIMS, and IMHO only viewable to Members.
Think about it this way - no Member is prevented from seeing those forums. They won’t notice any difference, in fact. And all of the more substantive forums that fight ignorance (ATMB, Cecil and Staff Reports, GD, GQ, and Cafe Society) are all still perfectly visible to Guests. And any Guest that wants to see the other forums can simply register.
Here are the upsides:
Easy and simple to implement and de-implement. Involves no database or code changes whatsoever, only forum settings.
Easy and simple to reverse if it doesn’t work or you all change your mind.
Does not change the way Members view the Board.
Keeps all ignorance-fighting forums still visible and linkable.
Does not restrict those that want to participate in the other forums from joining.
Prevents indexing and “giant sucking sound” of web robots and spiders indexing Pit threads and so forth.
Reduces the chance of Board Wars by (somewhat) restricting casual access to the Pit. Including people mailing (working) links to non-Members.
Possible downsides:
Unregistered Members cannot see the “lighter” forums. This seems only to be a problem if the primary purpose of the SDMB is to attract new Members interested in MPSIMS type and Pit-type activities. And I doubt that is the case.
MPSIMS, IMHO, and the Pit will no longer be indexed by Boardreader and other sites. This can be good or bad. Personally, I think it’s good.
How much bandwidth could it save? You’ld have to look at the “Who’s Online” to see in a typical peak session how many Guests are online, and then view details and count how many of them are viewing threads in those three forums. Then you can figure roughly assuming that all threads are equal length. I’ll hazard this might result in an immediate reduction in bandwidth of at least 10%, maybe as high as 25%. I wouldn’t know exactly, but it seems plausible. In fact Jenny, I’ll buy you a steak dinner for two if it doesn’t reduce bandwidth by at least 10%, with no real downside. 
Currently, content compression is disabled on The Reader’s servers. Content compression serves compressed versions of pages to users, significantly reducing bandwidth usage and decreasing load times for users. Enabling mod_gzip on the Apache server hosting chicagoreader.com would reduce bandwidth used by 18KB per hit, without increasing server load or modifying the page in any way. The size of Straightdope.com is decreased by 8KB per hit. Pages containing more text and code will shrink even more.
Ummm…according to this site, the SDMB is GZIP’ed already. I entered in this thread as a test.
What test did you do to determine it wasn’t GZIP’ed? 
A most interesting suggestion, Una. I think that I’d be very much in favor of that.
Maybe one steak dinner for each of you if it doesn’t drop bandwidth use by 10%…seriously. You know I’m good for it.
I think he meant chicagoreader.com and straightdope.com aren’t gzip’ed. Like you said, the SDMB is. I assume they run off the same pipe.
Ah, if that’s what he meant then I understand and agree with his assessment. Mind you it’s a small improvement on those pages (as opposed to here) but every bit helps, certainly.
That was the test I used. I’m actually surprised that the boards are GZIPed, since I would think that the load produced on the server compressing all the dynamic content would be unacceptable. The Reader’s other sites are textbook examples of the benefits of GZIP compresion, as compressing static content doesn’t increase server load.
It is odd that the main page shows “not gzipped” but the thread views show “are gzipped”. It threw me for a minute.
I agree with you in principle, absolutely, but in practice I found that even on my incredibly puny server with incredibly puny CPU power, turning on GZIP resulted in an effective 4-6 times speed increase overall. This seems to be the experience of many people over on the vBulletin forums as well. I guess it’s one of those things that’s more complex than it seems at first.