P&CA Board Speed

[sir digalot]

I have noticed at least on my connection that at certain times the board is slower then a very slow thing on a slow day in slowland.

i want to try and pinpoint the root cause of this, i know we have alot of visits from Search Englines such as google, Yahoo and MSN which when tehy are feasting on our board can make things slow. but I am sure there is more to it then just those.

Please help me modify the board by filling out my poll.
can you also add your connection speed/type to the poll so i know where to optimize more and how long it takes on average for a page to load.

My apologies that it is a long one. i am trying to improve the experience for us all and for any new posters.

Thank you

[Dave]

It is purely random for me. I think the main problem we have is that we are not hosted on a dedicated server and share the same server resources with other websites. In short sometimes the board flies whilst other times it can halt to a snails pace.

However other than culling the Database which means removing our historical posts therefore bringing it down to a more reasonable size I don't think there is much that can be done at the moment.

I am looking at moving the site and board to another host located in the UK, but this is currently not financially viable - but I hope to be in a position to go down this route sometime next year. This is one of the reasons we have a sponsors banner at the bottom of all forum pages, to help with the costs of the board.

I think the latest mods have helped in speeding up the board to some degree Digga though.

[Fredfredson]

I notice it mostly when posting new articles or long replies.

Night time around midnight CST is worst.

F
:pooter

[sir digalot]

just getting an idea, as to how it is fairing, i cannot really tell from my perspective, we have a bunch of computers and go through many hops,

i know the long reply is an issue, and rather then it being the database (admittedly it is a sequetial database so not ideal for that and as daav said we are not dedicated which makes a difference (big difference) in CPU time etc if i find it is the long post i may look at trying to find a quicker solution to the posting, not sure what, it will involve research, i certainly know we have some good if long articles and it can be annoying sometimes, what prompted me also is the increase in double posts recently.

i do not want ot trim the Db as it is a "ticket" to a good ranking though, but also i do not want our posters getting fed up with the speed of the board and going elsewhere, although it still is faster the ezhell.... :lol

[Jayne B]

It's usually good for me. I don't know my speed but it's that connection that runs along the phone line, available all the time. Onlya problem when everybody in this town runs home and turns on their computer at suppertime. Then it's slow. Some sites are so slow all the time that I hardly ever go there.... but you may have noticed it hasn't happened here ;) So don't change anything on my account.

[Die Allerbeste]

I don't post a lot, and when I do, my posts are brief. I read here every day, though, and the board is never slow. I read in the mornings around this time, and in the evenings sometime between 8:00pm and 10:00pm CST. (Add six hours for GMT)

Anyway, I voted "other" and thought I'd let you know...

Still loving it here. Much better than EzBoard. :wave

[CockySOB]

Digs, if you feel up to the challenge you could always add some caching scripts to the site to improve performance on recent read-hits. I'd also recommend making an archiving function for the bots to search which runs off static pages rather than DB hits. I'll be happy to help if you want to try either route.

Personally, I'd put the caching on first as it will most dramatically improve active user performance. It might also help reduce bot-crawl on the system, but that depends on teh bot being used.....