You know, I know it’s been gone over and over already, but I just want to say - in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, one of the people in charge of managing the nuts and bolts of this ramshackle board, which has the performance of an ancient donkey with syphilis, rickets, and a broken leg, ridden by a 450-pound man drunk out of his senses on Gordon’s gin - will understand how ridiculous the goddamn 300-second wait in between searches is.
I saw a reference to A.R. Cane in a thread and I wondered to myself if he was still alive, since I was under the impression he was quite old. I wanted to see his last post activity. I looked up his name in the search, but typed “A R Cane” instead of “A.R. Cane” because that was how it was spelled in the post which mentioned him. “Invalid user specified.” DURRRRRRRRR. Wait 300 seconds.
Hmm, what could I do in those 300 seconds? Well, writing this is something.
Hey - Jerry? That’s the guy in charge, right? Jerry? (I’m reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where the soldiers can’t remember who their Commanding Officer is.) Hey Jerry - could you just answer me this one simple question: why is it that other boards which use the exact same format as this one lack a 300-second delay? What is it about the SDMB that necessitates this search time, and the frequent board performance which is as slow as a trickle of piss out of the old and wrinkled nozzle of a donkey with gonorrhea?
Maybe, if, every time anyone is pissed off with the delay, they posted a new thread about how they feel about it, this forum would get so clogged up that TPTB might feel they should do something about it. Not likely, I admit, but it’s something that might work. Oh - wait; we are, and they aren’t.
On the other hand, there are aspects of how this board is run that are inexplicable and endlessly fascinating. Maybe we should look at it as a source of entertainment, and be grateful.
Some time ago, Jerry said that searches use the most resources for this message board. Searches are the reason that the SDMB is so slow. If the wait time was less, or eliminated, then the board would be even slower and more likely to crash. If we turned off the search ability, the SDMB would probably sprint like a gazelle on speed.
Simply disabling the New Posts feature would probably do it; and this coming from someone who utilizes that feature extensively. I’d be willing to give that up if we could cut the time between searches back.
But then why is it that other boards using the very same format as this one - talkbass.com, to use one example - run smoothly all the time AND don’t require Steven King’s “The Jaunt”-esque wait times?
What is it about this board that makes it impossible to have what so many other VBulletin boards can accomplish - good performance AND short wait times for searches?
I can’t remember if this has been explained before: is the problem human resources, in that no-one can spare enough time to make this board work, or physical resources, in that the hardware isn’t powerful enough? I appreciate that financial resources impact on both.
I believe Ed has said that searches are offloaded to a third-party server hosted by someone other than CL, and that that party is — well, I can’t recall his exact description, but it boils down to “inadequate”.
Lynn is right that searches are “hard” on the server (not really, but in a way). I know that Tuba hates for us (at least, for me) to make assumptions. But barring answers, assumptions are all we have to deal with. So, one possible and reasonable assumption is that the offloading server is weak. That can be because its hardware is insufficient, or it has too many sharers, or because it is incompetently administered, or any number of other reasons.
I don’t complain about the long search times. I participate in another message board, with much less traffic than this board, where they don’t allow searches AT ALL. Why? Because it was grinding performance to a halt.
The long wait between searches would be not nearly so irritating if the board did not blow up in my face so instantly and so frequently when I initiate a search, and then smarmingly demand that I wait another 295 seconds to attempt the same search.
I rarely search anymore, and, in general, board performance is so abysmal that I’m becoming alarmingly aware of a mixed feeling in coming to the board even to read and post.
That doesn’t work when you want to see all posts by a specific user. You still have to wait the 300 long seconds. And saying, “well, just use Google to search this board” is a ridiculous cop-out, on the order of a train conductor on a broken-down train telling the passengers to get out and walk.
But as Argent Towers points out, you can’t search for posts — POSTS — by a specific user. The instructions for doing so on the page you point out gives only threads, within which you must hunt down the user you specified.
Google has no equivalent to our “Show results as posts” option for searching.
