Now that we have the hood open and a test site and a small army of volunteer helpers, can we look at reducing the time between searches? We could make the change on the test site and have the volunteers bang the crap out of it with searches and see if anything breaks. I suspect that everything will be fine and it will be a very easy fix that will reduce a lot of frustration.
Google has no search timeout.
I’d appreciate it if people could manage to avoid threadshitting on my suggestion. We are all well aware of the alternative of using Google for searches. Thanks.
While Google search works well for various things, it’s a pain-in-the-ass for a variety of searches on this message board. I second the motion to reduce search timeout to 30 seconds, if feasible.
I also wish this to happen, because I am pretty sure that wasn’t what was causing our troubles during that period at all. Instead I believe it was poor management of servers by an incompetent IT guy.
Please be civil towards the staff, even if they are behind the scenes.
As someone who nearly exclusively uses “New Posts” to browse the board. Don’t forget that “New Posts” is a search, so that counts against you as well. Click New Posts, go to a thread, need to look something up and you’re locked out.
what an excellent suggestion - I don’t see a downside! 
IIRC, the 2 minute delay was applied several years ago as a possible solution to a software/hardware problem that caused board problems. AFAIK, the problem was never diagnosed and the delay didn’t fix it (something else did).
So maybe it’s time to remove this restriction? If you feel that 30 secs between searches would result in too much traffic, how about a compromise at 1 minute?
One of the reasons I joined the board when I did (I lurked for quite a while) was I needed to do a Search and it was only available to Members. Maybe a reduced ‘time between’ for members?
This is not only extremely rude, it’s wrong. Searches are very resource intensive, and the timeout was put into place to reduce the overall server load. As was already pointed out, hitting the New Posts button is a search, so there are more searches here than some folks realize.
While the SDMB runs fairly smoothly most of the time these days, we still have occasional complaints about board performance. Admittedly, the complaints do seem to be getting less frequent, so perhaps it is time to consider reducing the timeout. However, while I personally don’t have access to server statistics, the fact that we still have occasional performance issues rather strongly indicates that we don’t have a huge amount of readily available server capacity. Reduce the search time, and it is fairly likely that we will see some more severe resource starvation issues, like pages failing to load. A long wait between searches is annoying, but pages failing to load completely breaks the board and that’s much, much worse. That’s the potential downside of reducing the search time - frequent timeouts just trying to access the board in general.
There’s another issue that plagues some users. It’s what Siam Sam calls “zapping”. The board software seems to forget the last time that the user accessed the SDMB, so the New Posts feature breaks, posts in all forums show as read even when they haven’t been read, etc. This is not directly caused by server load. I don’t know what the issue actually is (because the IT folks never said in detail) but it’s something that can’t be easily fixed in the version of vBulletin that we are using. The problem affects some users more than others. Some don’t see it at all. One very important point that is relevant to this discussion is that the problem seems to get worse when the board seems to be suffering from other performance issues.
Database errors and database crashes seem to be getting more common as well. This can also be related to server loading.
I don’t know what all is going on behind the scenes right now. The re-skinning issues are pretty obvious since they are visible to everyone, but they are just a small part of what is happening.
My opinion, speaking as someone who does not have access to the server so I’m guessing as much as the rest of you are, is that changing the timeout right now would be a rather risky thing to do. If it were my system (which it’s not), I would wait until the dust settles with everything else before even considering a change like this.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.
id love to have a longer edit timer …
That’s what we were told 5 years ago. Maybe Zeno’s Paradox is at work and the dust will never settle. How far down is the dust cloud so far?
We’ve had a lot of complaints about board performance in those 5 years. In the past year or so, not so much, but before then we had quite a few complaints.
It’s not my decision either way, but if we are having performance issues and someone wants to change something that will definitely negatively impact performance, that seems like a no-brainer to me. Definitely do not do it.
Then god help this place if it ever actually got busy again.
And what is your evidence that changing the search time will “definitely negatively impact performance”? “Definitely” is a strong word, and requires strong evidence to back it up.
Eh, if we get busy again (assuming we don’t change the search timeout), I’d expect the board to perform the way it did when it used to be busier. In other words, if traffic increases to what it was a few years ago, we’ll get about the same amount of complaints about board performance as we did then.
It’s changing the search timeout that has the potential to make things go all wonky. Best case, the newer, faster servers we are on these days can handle the load, no biggie. Worst case, the board has massive problems, which was how it was when the timeout was first installed. During busy periods, pages would often fail to load, posts often wouldn’t go through, etc.
Searches are resource intensive. You can’t allow more searches without increasing the server load. Past experience indicates that the server load from more frequent searches is significant.
Like I said earlier, I don’t have access to server statistics so I can’t say how significant the impact would be, but it’s definitely going to negatively impact the overall server performance. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, maybe so little that nobody really notices, but it will definitely add to the server load.
That particular staff member responsible for that decision does not work at the Reader anymore. I am hoping their current IT staff are better at their jobs than he was.
I make no apologies for my rudeness. Having known a few IT people through my life, I recognised immediately he was out of his depth and didn’t have any idea how to address the problems, things that no other message board was suffering. I refuse to believe, even now, that the searches we make are any more complex or frequent than other vBulletin sites encounter. Something else was at fault, and the search delays have only superficially solved them.
I am not an IT expert by any means, nor do I know the capabilities of the Dope’s servers, but other message boards I belong to have no minimum time limit between searches, and they operate just fine. Just sayin’.
This, this right here is what I never understand.
It’s been said so many times (but it may have been you each time) that the searches were causing problems with board performance so we introduced a wait time to reduce the load on the servers.
Then you say we got new servers.
Then you say we can’t get rid of the wait time even thought the new servers are faster and might be able to handle the load. We won’t even test it because it has the potential of causing some performance problems.
I don’t understand the logic. Why not get rid of the delay for a few days (maybe a week so the novelty wears off) and see what happens. If we have issues, back it off or set it back to what it was. If there’s no issues, then every one is happy.
To me, this is like saying that since your last car would stall if it went over 45mph, you refuse to drive your brand new Honda on the freeway. You’re not even willing to test it.
ECM, do you have any actual reason to believe that more frequent searches on the new servers would actually cause problems? You pretty adamantly defend the 2 minute delay and often are right there to tell everyone about the “wonky” search engine on the board and how they should use google instead.