Just wondering why these boards slow to a snails pace at times. Would more bandwidth or more honkin servers solve the problem?
Just curious. I love these boards.
This has been covered numerous times in this forum. There is a dedicated server for this board and other functions at the Chicago Reader, however it is simply not powerful enough to handle the amount of users and the size of the database - there is several GB worth of threads available to access, dating back from late 1999 (I think) when the boards first switched from AOL. The server has been “optimized” to the best of Jerry the Tech God’s abilities, working with the funding he has, which is none. There is no revenue for the reader from these boards, and the Reader doesn’t have much investment in keeping it running, except that its good advertising for them, and we don’t really seem to cause many problems. Plans are in the works (As they have been for many years) to try and generate revenue/get a better server/ improve the boards, but to this date, nothing has been announced, or even remotely decided, as I understand it.
As another thread on this page right now can tell you, there is a webpage called www.boardreader.com which holds cached versions of this board - meaning you can search without taxing this server too much. Or you can wait until a quiet time, and do a search if you want to know more about the funding/server issues.
NOTE: I am not a mod or admin, so if one of them comes by, listen to them, not to me! 
No, that’s all pretty accurate. Thanks, mnemosyne.
Doesn’t boardreader.com have to download every thread regularly in order to do what it does?
If so, surely that would significantly offset any benefit gained from it?
Seems like we’d be getting a free lunch otherwise, so to speak.
To read the threads, boardreader downloads from the SDMB server, but to do a search, it runs off of its own cache - no hits to the server to search, but once you click on a result, the server gets affected. It saves a LOT of time to search, since that is one of the most draining things on the database.
boardreader doesn’t access the SDMB every day. A quick check there shows the most recent SDMB thread they have is from October 3.