How about a new server/board software?

mmasters

Been having troubles with the site lately, threads that wont load (I can't even open the thread about threads that wont load) and terrible lagging on the server.

Could it be about time to upgrade the board software/server? Of all the message boards I frequent this one ranks lowest on performance.
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davep · Expert Joined: Jun 21, 2006 Posts: 1243 Location: Europe

Agreed. We could all chip in.

I hear it's the MySQL server that can't handle the queries as the site increases in size. If Aaron knows what the bottleneck is (CPU, Disk I/O, too little RAM) it would be cheap to get the thing going better in the short term, with a view to a longer-term replacement.

It may also be worth going to the latest version of the software, as it may have better-formed queries for larger boards.
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mmasters

Yeah, I was thinking it was a scalability problem as well.

Fund drive sounds like a good idea, I would chip in 20 bucks.

Be nice to have a slick visually appealing board that could handle a big user load.
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Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destory health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality.

Aaron

It's a funding issue primarily.

And we hate begging for money...

But yeah, we could all benefit from another upgrade. (There have been several)
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mmasters

How about a fund drive for a complete overhaul? That way no more tactical fixing is necessary and people can be happy their contributions are going towards a significant improvement.
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Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destory health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality.

JPL

MySQL is a bastard for running a high-trafffic web-site with. It mainly falls down when you are running big cross-table searches at the same time as you are doing frequent updates. The big queries lock the DB and then everything falls over from that point on.

If you are on a tight budget on a big MySQL DB the best solution is to slice old data out of the tables. Some of that crap from a couple of years ago that nobody reads (grin). This will make the 'killer' queries a lot faster.

If you have more budget - upgrade the memory & the HDD - the most & the best of both that you can afford. This can blow through some (if not most of) of the memory swop-out issues that MySQL seems to be prone to.

(I'm sure Aaron knows all this already...)

JP

jedinvest

Sure. I am good for $20-$40, considering how I am wasting my life waiting for the PeakOil site to refresh -- never mind waiting for peak oil to strike.

How about we print up some T-SHIRTS that say Peak Oil and distribute them as complementary gifts for $40 plus shipping. But we need a killer graphic. Any suggestions??

mmasters

PeakOiler

DantesPeak

I'd be glad to contribute.

I find that sometimes that my posts won't take (I just get server not found message), which is very frustrating when it happens on a busy day.
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davep · Expert Joined: Jun 21, 2006 Posts: 1243 Location: Europe

The donation link is there, so it's time to put your money where your mouth is...
_________________
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become. - Buddha

BrownDog

My experience isn't with web forum software specifically, but it occurs to me that moving older posts to an alternate (archive) instance would be useful. Archive searches would still be slower, but current activity would be faster. Of course, this involves an archive process, which increased the administrative tasks. And yes, money, too.

It's not a surprise that successive upgrades only help in the near term. The data will grow to match the capacity. Or something like that... Smile

grink1tt3n

The slowness/complexity is the reason I built http://bravo9.com/peakoil/

1. Where was I?: I got tired of figuring out which page I was on, b9/po shows the last
20 or some posts, which is all you usually need anyway.
(Load the topic, jump to the bottom, automatically most recent post)

2. Page complexity: I like to read the forums on-the-go, for a mobile device phbb is way to complex. Too much cruft on the side of the screen.

3. The forums are slooooow: For browsing (read-only) there's no reason the server should have to regenerate the page every time, for every person; that's silly. b9/po makes a cached copy and serves that out.

Aaron, I've mentioned this before, but if you want help setting something like this up on peakoil.com proper, let me know.

Aaron