[ul]
[li]Go to User CP in the upper left of the screen[/li][li]Under the heading Settings & Options, choose Edit Options[/li][li]Scroll down to Thread Display Options[/li][li]Use the drop down menu under Number of Posts to Show Per Page to change the setting to Show 200 Posts Per Page[/li][/ul] If you’re experiencing slow loading times, at least this way there are fewer pages to load to read a thread once you get in it!
I would think that if the board set this as the default setting for all users, that would be a big help in taking some stress off the server.
Wouldn’t that make it harder for the server? Now it has to go and dig up the first 200 posts instead of the first, what is it set to, 50, 30 something like that.
This only saves server load if you habituate threads with way more than 50 posts… if you spend more time in short threads (like this one, currently), you’re not saving any time, so, on average, it’s not going to make a big difference.
What might make more of an effect on server load is if people didn’t post helpful tips on how to light server load, like this one. Darn that Heisenberg…
It seems to me that it’d only decrease server loads if you routinely start reading a thread after it’s already gotten long. For threads you habituate, it seems like it would actually increase them: If there’s a long-running thread that I’m following, then usually, when I check in on it, I’ll only need to read the last page (actually, usually only the last few posts on the last page). With this change, I’d still be loading the same number of pages, but the pages I load would be larger.
If waiting for threads to load is a big issue, you can just load multiple threads or pages of threads at once, in different tabs. I usually keep about five tabs of threads open at once, and when I finish with one, I open a new one. That way, the total load I’m putting on the server is exactly the same as if I opened them one at a time, but if one is slow to load, I can go read another. Rarely do they load so slowly that I find myself with nothing to read at all.
From my observations, the 200 post setting puts a smaller hit on the board, assuming people are going to go from page to page. Retrieving 50 or 200 posts at the same time appear to have a negligible difference. Each page load is a bigger hit than the amount on the page you are loading.
Where the 200 post setting really helps is if you need to search the thread. Instead of using the search tool which hits the server hard, you can just use your browsers Find option. Ctrl F in IE & Google Chrome of course.