So have you noticed that since we created Cafe Society the number of posts in General Questions had diminished? Or since we created IMHO that the number of posts in MPSIMS has diminished?
To answer my rhetorical question - no the number of posts in the other fora have not diminished.
Sigh. This is somewhat my feeling, too, but I’m torn a few different ways.
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Sometimes people, highly intelligent people, even, need to let their socks down and just chat. MSPSIMS fills that need.
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There are plenty of Dopers (average age, I suspect, about 20 years younger than I am), who are smart and curious, but aren’t really experts in any particular area (yet). The SDMB is a perfect way for suchlike to test their reasoning and understanding.
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There are also a fairly large number of people who are reasonably intelligent–not specialists or geniuses–who like to hang around other people who are intelligent. Unfortunately, these people tend to post as much (or more) than people with something genuine to contribute to knowledge. So we end up with thousands of posters unfamiliar with Cecil’s books, who do not search to see whether their question has been raised before, and are really more interested in expressing their opinion, than anything else.
If one of these groups had to go, or was subject to modest charge, or was moderated to avoid endless, duplicate, opinionated, “me too” postings, I could choose.
Chaim,
Why don’t you use the {sub} tags to make your sigtext smaller?
That’s irrelevant, I’m afraid. The issue we have with long sigs is not so much an esthetic one, but a bandwidth one. The server needs to look up and transfer the sig information everytime it gets posted - sub tags don’t decrease the amount of information to be transferred. So, in order to cap the demand a bit, we set the maximum length at an arbitrary four lines, and we prefer it if people respect that wish.
Ahhhhh…
I posted my sig there because I forgot what was in it. Is that too long as well? I’ve never thought about it before.
Dan - the messages on the SDMB are all stored in a single database file called “Post.MYD”. This file it linked in with portions of many other files to produce the threads that you see - other files such as “Thread.MYD” and “Forum.MYD”. Moving posts from one Forum to another does not really change the time either positively or negatively, as they all end up being served/stored in the same locations, and the only thing that changes is the index as to what threads and forums the posts belong in.
So basically, if the overall traffic does not increase, having multiple Fora does not technically change the speed. Now, there are some human factors issues to consider, associated with having multiple Fora, even if the traffic does not increase. For example - dividing out posts into a PC Forum may speed the Board up, if all things were equal, because there may be less people accessing the same indexes to build the forumdisplay. But that would be a very minor differential - on a Board like the SDMB, likely immeasureable.
The other human factors issue, all things not being equal, is that a PC Forum would increase reads and posts, just like gas expanding the filla void.
That’s kind of what I figured, Anthracite. So if all of the messages were not all stored in the same database - i.e., there were individual MYD files for each forum - then the creation of a new forum might make sense?
Note I’m not asking for a new forum or a reorg of the system by any means - just asking hypothetically.
Well, then we get to the next factor, which is what is the real slowdown of the SDMB? According to what jdavis has posted, it is the server thrashing through memory during these operations that is the basic reason behind the slowdown. In that case, accessing a different file for each Forum might not make any difference. It would depend a lot on how you have your caching set up, and how much memory you have.
Also, making a different databse file for each Forum is essentially re-writing the software from the ground-up. I will say this - there are lots of people on the vBulletin developers Forums who are obsessed with optimization (as well they should be), and IIRC this is not ever considered seriously as a viable, practical, or even beneficial option.
The short answer, I fear, is “no”.
Arnold Winkelried and Anthracite, I haven’t seen the specifics, but it sounds like folks need to get a little creative solving the performance problem. (“Server thrashing through memory”?..hmm…)
Among the techniques I’ve used professionally to speed up critical applications may be a few that haven’t been tried:
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Get a dual processor. Or a multiple processor, if vBulletin is multi-threaded. Even if it isn’t a dual processor, in my experience, it will offload about %30 of the operating overhead to the processor that isn’t handling vBulletin.
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Buy RAID disks. Even RAID 0, which is the cheapest, still doubles most kinds of disk access.
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I almost wrote about this another time, but I couldn’t quite figure out what vBulletin was doing to make a specific recommendation. I presume most people access pages though a) Browsing through a forum, b) searching for one’s own name, to see whether there’s any activity on threads they’ve contributed to, c) Viewing New Posts.
There are ways to optimize all three of these, depending on vBulletin’s limitations.
The “View New Posts” feature recreates each of the several numbered pages as each is displayed. This is more of a bug than a feature, because by the time a user gets to the “next” page, some of the contents of “previous” pages may migrate there. It would be better to get a static picture of all the new posts, and page through the static picture until the user requests a refresh. (This may be an artifact of the browser setting to “Refresh pages every time you visit”. If that’s so, then some user education is in order, to stop people needlessly refreshing pages.)
Searching for one’s name, which I use frequently, has as a default “Search entire posts”. Most of the time this is NOT what I want, I just want threads with recent activity, where one of the posters is me. That should be a much less intensive search.
Also, I’ve found that sometimes just specifying “yesterday” in the search misses posts, so if I’m diligent, I have to choose “a week ago”, when I actually just need the last couple days.
As for browing forums, I imagine that many people browse by going to the title page, first. (Then several times as they go between forums.) The (small) problem is that the post and thread counts really aren’t that useful, yet at least one record (maybe several?) has to be retrieved each time the top page of the message board is displayed, if the browser is set to “Refresh pages every time you visit”.
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The “Go to first unread post” feature should avoid getting the earlier posts. Or at least there should be the option to avoid getting earlier posts. I’d use that option 90% of the time. ESPECIALLY if it was 10 times faster.
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The “sticky” posts at the top of the board are useless for most users, most of the time. If there was a way to combine all of them in a forum in to one, or to only display the messages for people with < 100 post count, it would be that much fewer records to retrieve.
With all due respect, and not to sell your ideas short at all, I think every issue you bring up has been brought up, on multiple occasions. The reasons they have not been implemented are:
No money to buy hardware, no business model to accept donations for hardware, no business model to accept hardware period.
I think the SDMB already uses a RAID array.
This requires code changes, which the SDMB now has a policy of not implementing.
Now this is an interesting suggestion, and I would like to second it. I very often myself want to look back for items in the last 2-3 days, but since there is not that option, I select “last week”. It also does not take a code change.
Go to the searchintro template, and where you find:
<option value="1">yesterday</option>
<option value="5">a week ago</option>
change it to:
<option value="1">yesterday</option>
<option value="3">2-3 days ago</option>
<option value="5">a week ago</option>
and this will allow a 3-day search. This might actually work for reducing Search effort, Arnold. It’s a response to what might be a human factors thing, and adding the option to the drop-down adds essentially 0 overhead to the search page (maybe a nanosecond or two, it was hard to time it)
In fact, I just added it to my Board. 
This is a code change, and the SDMB will likely not do this.
This is sorta splitting hairs, I fear. Showing the Sticky posts, which are actually important to have up there on the Forums, is a matter of differential microseconds.
On the subject of not changing the code - is the vBulletin software that this place uses shareware, freeware, or a fully registered pay program? In other words, do they not want to change the code because they’re not really supposed to (lacking the authority to edit someone else’s work) or because it’s just too tricky of an enteprise, or what?
Thanks, Anthracite, for the summary. The situation sounds like one where people have made up their minds what effort is appropriate, and in what directions.
RAID 0 is cheap and fairly common (I have it on my home PC). There are higher level RAID disks much faster and more expensive. If they’re economizing, they probably don’t have the better RAID.
Options are: 1) SDMBers buy the needed equipment, and have it appear mysteriously on the system administrator’s doorstep; 2) Get a group of SDMB’s who are professional programmers to tune a copy of vBulletin, and have it appear mysteriously… ; 3) Convince somebody with deep pockets to buy equipment for a mirror site, and another somebody to donate space and administration, for SDMBers who are just browsing. Power users would use both.
I’ll certainly tune the searchintro template. Where is it found?
vBulletin (www.vbulletin.com) is a fully licensed piece of software, that costs about $85 a year (depending on your license). It ships with its complete source code. You can and may alter the program substantially, including modifying nearly all of the source code. The problem is that when you modify the code, and you do an upgrade, you lose all of your mods, and have to re-implement all of them. Even with the few modifications I’ve made to my site, it takes me about 4-8 hours of work.
Upgrading takes, and the SDMB does not have people with that time available. Also, they are reluctant to modify the code due to the problems it causes when they report an issue to the vBulletin people - they will not support you officially if you have mods in place.
Errmm…that was a comment to Arnold that I was making. It’s something that the SDMB would have to do. I’m sorry. :o
It sounds like a monumental pain in the ass to make any alterations, even if permission was granted. 
Forgot to add this -
Also seems that the only way for changes to be implemented is to wait for the next vB upgrade, and even then the newer version might not solve the problems we have here. Question - are there any vBulletin boards out there with the traffic this one has? Just curious.
There are some huge vBulletin Boards out there. One that I saw one time had 2 million posts by 18 months, IIRC. And more than 100,000 Members. There is a rumour of a Board with 5 million+ posts, but I can’t find it.
Back to the original gist of the thread, how about eBay questions? While computer support questions are somewhat annoying, especially when you take into account all the people here who are Bobs and Bofhs, at least they aren’t (usually) support for a paid service that should be doing it’s own support.
I suppose the biggest problem with banning any one type of question is that there aren’t really any types of questions banned at the moment. -gry or one of the other once a days will get locked on occasion, but there isn’t any class of honest question (other than the ones that belong in the other forums) in GQ that isn’t allowed, is there?
The reason I asked is that if there are larger boards out there using the same software, I wonder how they deal with their server issues - do they just have larger servers, do they tweak the code themselves, do they wait for the latest vBulletin, etc.