I don’t know if this falls under the category of “more tweaking vB than we want to go into,” but maybe this wouldn’t be such a hard fix: I’ve noticed that the style sheet governing the appearance of the SDMB is delivered with every single page. Why not use an external style sheet and save the bandwidth? Then it would only have to be downloaded at most once per user per session - becuase it would be cached on the user’s computer. The style sheet alone takes up 808 characters. No, that’s not a huge amount, but considering the number of times it gets downloaded hourly, I bet it adds up quickly.
There’s also a bit of javascript that possibly could be served externally, and another small one which is commented out, doing nothing but taking up space.
(Not to mention a LOT of unneccesary FONT tags, etc, in the main body of the page, but I’m sure there’s nothing to do for that but upgrade vB to version 3, which appears to be cleaner - and I don’t get the impression that will be happening anytime soon.)
The “Forum Jump” menu at the bottom of each page appears to run a resource consuming script rather than behave as a simple link.
The “jump to first new post” button also appears to be server resource intensive.
Serving up all of those ALT text bits for the mouseover thread title previews has to gobble up a chunk of server processing, not to mention conection bandwidth down the line to a user’s browser to send out that extra text.
If people use it faithfully, it may ultimately reduce network traffic by cutting down on the number of threads being served. That may be a good thing, but initially, it looks like we’re going to be hurt in both processor use and connection bandwidth.
And can we talk about those inline style sheets?
The dang things have mushroomed to almost 4800 characters. That’s over 4K PER PAGE VIEW that can be lopped off by using a regular CSS sheet instead of inlining them. Multiply 4K by the number of page views in a day, and you’re going to find a rather large amount of wasted bandwidth.
All the suggestions in this thread are good ones. But perhaps they are better directed towards the vBulletin people, not the SDMB gurus.
SDMBers are – for good reason – reluctant to use hacks on the vB code. And any such hacks would be wiped out anyway in the next upgrade, as probably happened in this one. That may be why we don’t have the quick reply box yet.
IMHO, saving a few bytes of storage or transmission time doesn’t seem to be a high priority for software designers like vBulletin. What’s 4K more for a fast server and an infinitely-large outpipe? At the price of hardware today, it might be cheaper (so they might think) just to upgrade some parts.
Of course, that attitude doesn’t help people on bad dialups or incredibly small budgets. Such is life
[auote]What’s 4K more for a fast server and an infinitely-large outpipe?
[/quote]
But we already know the Chicago Reader has neither of those. It feels more like an arthritic hamster and a 192K residential DSL line. :d Sometimes it’s more like a 14,400 baud modem. :eek:
SDMB on a dialup? Oh. My. Og. It’s bad enough on our OC-12 - a “fat” and fast fiber backbone that I’m quite sure the CR won’t have. I’ll bet their ISP doesn’t even have it. The big problem here really isn’t absolute bandwidth of the CR’s connection, but the ability of their servers to handle the transactions, pull things out of the database, build pages and stuff them out the wire to the world.
During the day, when use is high, the servers just can’t keep pace with the demand. And, the admins here say every time they’ve ever done a server upgrade, demand quickly absorbed new capacity, and things were quickly back to the usual poky ways. That they can upgrade the servers at all is a small miracle for a free newpaper. Will we ever see the likes of a Sun Enterprise server here? Not unless Sun knocks about $249,000 off the price. :rolleyes: If a Sun Fire 15K miraculously appeared at the CR, we’d probably enjoy Amazon.com-like speed and reliabilty for ever and ever, but don’t hold your breath.
Oh well, it continues to be free, and we can fairly safely expect it to remain free. Let’s just be glad it works at all.
By comparing the speed at which a link (stored in favorites) to a new forum opens, vs the speed at which a selection from the forums menu opens.
Same sort of deal on the go to latest post button vs show last page button.
