Trolling for little boys again? This isn’t MySpace, dude.
Still waiting for that explanation of how Internet works.
Haven’t you heard? It’s all tubes, man.
grumble, grumble*
I know this is the Pit, and flaming is tolerated here where it isn’t in the other forums, but do we really need another dick-measuring contest here, that the rest of us don’t really give a rat’s ass about as much as why the boards time out?
Dudes, can’t we all just get along? Everyone knows that the reason some people time out and others don’t is because you haven’t done proper obeisance to the All-powerful, All-knowing, Mighty Pink Unicorn. Duh.
Why would one have to organize the user tables like this?
But they’ll be richer in so many other ways.
Zzzzziiiiiiing! There’s Miller with his predictable slick-as-fuck one-liner!
I thought you were talking about Miller until you got to the Unicorn part.
I have read and even OPed threads like this, and it’s always the same. A poster will complain about the numerous timeouts and wonder why every other site they visit doesn’t timeout, then someone will come in and say “bollocks, I never have timeouts, it’s your problem”, and then a pissing match ensues.
What I am beginning to think is that it’s a combination of factors…firstly, the administration of this board, technical and financial, is puposfully withheld from the customers who pay for it, like the poor widdle Reader is the fucking Bilderberg Group or something, so nobody here really has enough data to go on. Secondly, there may very well be some weak link in the chain between some ISPs and the poor widdle Reader’s servers, but how to identify those weak links may be a pretty daunting task; I don’t know.
Perhaps someone more technically savvy than I would know which questions to ask when someone has timeouts, to troubleshoot the problem, like who’s your ISP, what’s your location, what time was it when you timed out, etc.
I think that if we were to put our heads together and try to gather as much info as possible, we would end up in the same cul-de-sac that is the Politburo of the poor widdle Reader.
You can use WinMTR to trace the route from your computer to the boards, it will also give you the time it takes for a message to get there. This will tell you if it is timing out between you and the boards.
Enter boards.straightdope.com as the host and let it run. The results for me as I type this are :-
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| My computer - 0 | 205 | 205 | 0 | 6 | 188 | 0 |
| c7304.hath.eurisp.net - 1 | 205 | 203 | 46 | 66 | 141 | 63 |
| gw.hath.eurisp.net - 1 | 205 | 203 | 46 | 71 | 234 | 78 |
| 212.248.197.5 - 2 | 204 | 200 | 47 | 73 | 219 | 78 |
| 212.248.197.1 - 1 | 204 | 203 | 46 | 75 | 281 | 78 |
| 212.187.136.25 - 2 | 204 | 201 | 46 | 71 | 281 | 79 |
| ae-4-4.ebr1.London1.Level3.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 62 | 78 | 156 | 109 |
| ae-12-51.car2.London1.Level3.net - 1 | 204 | 203 | 62 | 89 | 406 | 78 |
| bcr1-ge-6-1-0.londonlnx.savvis.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 62 | 79 | 297 | 94 |
| bcs1-so-1-1-0.Londonlnx.savvis.net - 1 | 204 | 203 | 62 | 77 | 156 | 78 |
| bcs1-as0-0.Londonlnx.savvis.net - 1 | 204 | 203 | 62 | 124 | 188 | 93 |
| cr1-pos-0-8-0-0.NewYork.savvis.net - 1 | 204 | 202 | 156 | 167 | 453 | 172 |
| dcr1-so-1-2-0.Chicago.savvis.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 156 | 172 | 422 | 172 |
| ber2-pos-1-0-0.Chicago.savvis.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 156 | 167 | 359 | 172 |
| ber1-vlan-241.chicagoequinix.savvis.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 156 | 170 | 547 | 172 |
| bpr2-ge-7-0-0.ChicagoEquinix.savvis.net - 2 | 204 | 201 | 156 | 171 | 454 | 172 |
| 208.174.225.202 - 2 | 204 | 200 | 156 | 173 | 266 | 187 |
| boards.straightdope.com - 2 | 204 | 200 | 156 | 162 | 188 | 156 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR - 0.8. Copyleft @2000-2002 Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir ( stanimir@cr.nivis.com )
Have fun!
There is no custom table structure for the SDMB, from what I understand; it’s mostly stock vBulletin. There should be just one user table, called user. It contains about 50 to 60 fields such as:
userid
usergroupid
username
password
email
homepage
usertitle
customtitle
joindate
daysprune
lastvisit
lastactivity
… and more. I’ll [snip] here, since vBulletin isn’t open source, even though it’s visible code.
Let us not forget the omnipotent “Flying Spaghetti Monster” who can kick the Unicorns ass in a New York minute. And then serve dinner. :dubious:
Bottom line: we are paying for a service that is far inferior to what everyone else gets for free.
The DBA is either hideously over-worked or completely incompetent (Sorry, Jerry).
As someone with a degree in Networking, a CCNA, and experience with PHP and MySQL, I can say that Dudley is way more knowledgeable than just about anyone else in this thread.
As far as the technically clueless posters go, I know your intentions are good and I’ve been here as long as you, but the fact remains that the performance here isn’t (and has never been) even close to other (free) boards with far more traffic.
Over the years, I’ve visited this board on a 56k connection from PA, ditto from LA, a cable connection from LA, a DSL connection from LA, a T1 from LA, and, back to PA, another DSL connection, another cable connection, and anther T1 from a State building.
I’ve had the same damned problems on every one of those connections, but not on any other site.
How do you explain that?
I didn’t want to tell you, but there’s a subset of “really cool posters” that never get timed out. and if you’re getting timed out, well…
FWIW: I get timed out on several other sites as well as this one (which just goes to show you that I’m not one of the ‘really cool posters’ alluded to above).
Hey, at least you managed to use this retort in response to an actual one-liner for a change! Congratulations on learning to count!
You’ve always been one of my favorite posters, Miller, but when it comes to the board’s performance, Dudley is 100% right.
Really, technophobically defending the actions of the people who operate this board is a waste of time. They either don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, or they don’t care.
Period.
Sure. So do I. Just not at some place that I pay money for, and not over a period of seven fucking years on a site that refuses to upgrade their software, you know?
I’m guessing that if you have a table with say 2,000,000 records, on poor hardware, it’d probably be a dog. A quick remedy would be create a new table and split them up. So, table A would have 1,000,000 records and table B would have 1,000,000. Reading from and writing to table A would theoretically take half the time as it would before it split. You can write queries that will select, update, insert or delete records based on each table, which cuts down on the performance overhead vastly.
Keep in mind, MySQL is junk for large scale applications, unless it is used in conjunction with very cleverly written code. I would say that based on the number of posts and user accounts on this board, the database structure used here has bandaids on its bandaids mainly because the code is vBulletin and really the only thing than can be done in manipulating the database structure to increase performance.
Who’s defending the operation of the board?