As a matter of interest, what is the bandwidth of the SDMB? Is the bandwidth a bottleneck or is CPU usage a bottleneck? And how much would subscriptions have to rise to alleviate the bottleneck?
This has been hashed out so many times. I have never seen a direct answer, but I do not blame the staff here. I assume they are kept in the dark about as badly as we are.
The real bottleneck here is the fact that we have a huge database of old postings dating back to 1999, all in real-tme active mode. Think of it this way: It’s difficult to run swiftly carrying everything you own on your back. 
We suspect that is the main cause of our problems. We’re working on solving this and hope to have a read-only archive for most everything we currently carry. That would greatly reduce the load on the server and speed the process up considerably.
As far as subscription revenue = speed, no, that’s not how this works. We have never promised so and do not do so today.
Subscriptions help keep us offering you a site, a board, a community, as somebody/something has to cover the costs of keeping this place open. The Reader carried us for a long time, but in today’s business environment they can no longer do that and we must pay our own way. Just because something has been freely offered in cyberspace does not mean it costs nothing to operate it.
If you like what you see and appreciate what we offer, we ask that you help keep us in business. We appreciate greatly those who put their money where their mouth is.
TubaDiva
Has something changed? I remember you telling us that archiving would not help at all.
*Comes back from searching and tasking the server even more *
Yep back in the day here’s what you were saying
We didn’t have such an enormous database then, either.
Now we do. We literally are carrying our history – everything we own – on our backs as we move through the day.
We’re working on fixing that.
TubaDiva
Cool.
I don’t think the old messages alone slows things down. IMHO, it’s the searching; instead of a search crawling through a few hundred thousand messages, it’s millions.
I’ve encountered a coupleof message boards with massive databases that just offloaded their search function to Google. Since searchbots are blocked by this site, that’s not possible here.
Just throw out all the old data. The IRS isn’t going to come asking for it. This would have the dual benefit of speeding things up and sparing us from the pedants whose sole mission is to tell everyone they should look in the archives before posting. (Nobody ever searches before posting anyways).
I wouldn’t dump it. Disk space is aproaching free, and the fastest way to create a need for something is to get rid of it.
How about archiving oh, let’s say, anything older than 18 months to a read-only system and turn this stuff loose so Google can crawl it? It’ll all be readable, and since Google’s doing the indexing, there should be little, if any, database load. Just a bit of HTTP serving to show the pre-fab static pages.
Special bonus to guests is that it’s freely searchable.
Archiving is the answer; we’d prefer to give you as much of your material as we can.
The problem is in how we do this; it’s not an automatic vB function. Investigation of exactly how we set this up and run it is in progress.
TubaDiva
While we’re talking about making suggestions, I’d like to make one. (I imagine that this has occurred to someone, but, you never know, you know?)
When I find myself wanting to search for an old post/thread, very often it’s not that old, and I have a pretty good memory of what the title was. How about simply making more room for posts before they drop off the last page? I don’t know exactly how the “drop-off” is calculated, but it looks like a thread dies if its last post to date is longer than a couple of days. What about simply increasing that to a couple of weeks?
Would that cause slower performance than what we see? Even if it were slower, might it be simply more even? (As opposed to the sometimes lightning fast and sometimes moleasses slow I’ve been seeing.)
The SDMB default “drop-off” is 50 posts (not counting stickies) or 2 days, whichever comes first.
You can change this default from the “Display Options:” menu at the bottom of each forum page.
Well… sunuvagun!
I’ll go hide, now :o
Yeah, we’re gonna have to lop off the Geek and leave you as JustAnother. 
Heh…
Hey, I never claimed to be JustAnObservantGeek
