I wonder if you could adapt the vBulletin software to use a custom file-based storage scheme instead of a database … I’d be prepared to bet that would cut a lot of time spent SQL processing. This would just be for threads and thread posts… it wouldn’t be worth changing the way user info (and anything else) is stored, as I suspect the SQL that selects the posts that makes up a page of thread is the main crunch factor.
Perhaps a better and quicker improvement would be to have a whip-round on the SDMB for contributions to a “New SDMB Hardware” fund. I’d throw in a few quid!
Today has been especially slow. It took five minutes just to load the forums page, and another five to get into Great Debates at 11:00 AM PDT. There are days when I don’t want to use Preview because that just adds another five minutes.
Jerry the Tech God tells me at times the server thrashes around wildly. That is when things really get slow.
Why does this happen? Because we’re running at maximum capacity nearly all the time and sometimes it’s just too much.
What are we doing about it? Jerry’s trying to smooth things out so we have less server strain and more useful activity, but outside of a little bit of tweaking, that’s all we’re getting.
It’s not that Jerry doesn’t care or the Reader doesn’t give a damn, but we are still not making them any money and they are not inclined to throw more money our way for no return on their investment.
They’re not even willing to spring for what it what take for a software upgrade – there’s just no money in the budget for the Reader to take a tech and put them to work fixing all the bugs and maintaining the system. (The last time they did this we had to have full time tech help for quite a long time, at the Reader’s expense.)
Again, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that the Reader IS a business and needs to make a profit. We’re not a profit making concern yet.
As to why they turned down the Teeming’s fund raising drive, while all appreciate the thought, legally they couldn’t accept such a gift.
Please try to make the best of what we have, 'cause it is all we have.
One of the 13,473 members, who happens to be an incredibly weathy philanthropist, will just have to anonomously donate $10K(or whatever it takes) to the Reader for the software upgrade. That would take care of the legality.
C’mon! If one in 30 or so people have the same birthday as I, then surely there must be a gazillionaire out there to whom 10K or so means squat. Please stand up.
Yeah. Easy to do since I post at a public library!
No problems today so far, but it’s ALWAYS easy to get in on Saturdays. I’m just glad I live on the West Coast. Being two or three hours removed from most of the country means that even on weekdays, the traffic is much, much less in the evenings.
Is it just me, or is the formatting of this page completely screwed up? I’m hoping it’s just me. MSIE’s been acting oddly lately, first with certain characters not appearing and now with this thread not wrapping to my screen. Very odd. If this persists, I might get Netscape or another browser that appeals to me more. Look for threads in IMHO asking for suggestions if I do decide to change.
Well, I used a rather long “code” tag that extends off to the right, but that should only screw up that one post. The other posts should fit in the usual window. Sometimes when I load a page, some bits don’t make it, and the result is rather screwy. In that case, reloading the page solves the problem.
No, but I always do a simple test: I open another window and try going to other websites. If those other sites come up much faster than the SDMB, the problem then is with the SDMB or with its server, right?
Or it could be with the Reader’s ISP (which happened a week or so ago, IIRC) or with the Chicago area in general. About the most complete breakdown in the system I’ve ever experienced was when I instinctively checked to see if I had email, then realized that my computer wasn’t actually hooked up to the LAN in my fraternity house, which didn’t matter, as our server wasn’t actually hooked up to the cable modem at the time, which didn’t really matter either, because Road Runner accidentally disconnected us, which also didn’t matter, as my college (including the mail server) was temporarily disconnected from the internet due to upgrading something. In general, though, it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s slow because of the load on the server. I’d say that’s the primary reason for incredible slowness 95% of the time, as a rough estimate, unless your ISP sucks. But the chances of the path between your ISP and the Reader’s server being at fault is pretty small.
Traffic problems between your computer and the Reader are not the most common thing, but they do happen and when they do (as happened last week, in fact, at the same time the server jittered across the floor over at the Reader offices), the lag time tends to be really bad. So while it’s not an everyday occurence (thanks be) it DOES happen.
“No, but I always do a simple test: I open another window and try going to other websites”
Hmm. I have a better test for you. Open another window & visit the Straight Dope home page. That one always works well for me & is really fast, as are any pages I click from there except the Forum page, except when the forum page is slow.
That’s because the all the pages aside from the message board are static html pages. When you point your browser at www.straightdope.com, your computer connects, asks for something, and the server grabs the index.html file that’s probably right in memory and sends you a copy.
On the other hand, when you ask for the massage board, you are asking for a php file. When you request one of those, it tells the server to interpret the script in it, which will then pull information from a database, probably accessing the hard drive, where the server will then construct a brand new html file just for you. The servers at www.straightdope.com and boards.straightdope.com also have different IP addresses, meaning they may very well be on different machines.
In either case, perhaps the best analogy would be to the difference between photocopying a page and looking up 15 separate items in the encyclopedia, photocopying them, and assembling it into one page. The difference between the two activities is probably at least that far apart.
Now, if there’s a lot of traffic, then the actual processing of connections becomes a factor as well. It takes a lot of photocopying (and taking the orders for photocopies as well) to actually have an effect that doesn’t pale in comparison to the searching through encyclopedias, though.
And I sometimes do the main page test to verify which one it is.
I had an alternative idea for helping fund The Reader, in this thread. Of course, the idea needs some fleshing out, but I didn’t think it would die as quickly as it did.
