Down to you Kim

I can't understand this thread. The speed of browsing these forums is quick and consistent. I never have any problems. Are you sure it's not a case of your isp having insufficient bandwidth at peak times?

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Re: Posting pictures

perhaps one of the performance problems is caused by having to search all over the web for the different pictures. Would it be possible to save the User picture somewhere within your own site? Should you limit pictures within posts to a max number and size, and insist others are accessed by links?
Perhaps you should have a government health warning that posting to these forums is addictive, and likely to have a major impact on your free time?
Could you consider having a list of smileys that you select when making a post (similar to the system at http://cruiserlog.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=Forum)

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I see very few piccies, only one advert, but the speed of the forum is still much slower than that of any of the three motorcycle forums I haunt. In particular, the speed with which a post is loaded is irritatingly slow.

Why should this be? Same ISP each time, so the problem can only be with YBW. And it would be my impression that there are far more posts and users on one of the bike forums (visordown) though I have no way of actually knowing this.

Are you using an old IBM AT as a server, Kim? /forums/images/icons/smile.gif


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Re: No problem here at all..............

NM./forums/images/icons/laugh.gif

<hr width=100% size=1>If it aint broke fix it till it is.
 
Also worth considering is WindowWasher - this cleans cookies, cache and almost anything you want. After a while all the downloaded bits and bobs can take a long time for the machine to search, particularly if the disk is heavily fragmented. I wash and defrag every night, and the performance is pretty good. I'm currently running on a 512k ADSL with 20:1 theoretical contention. I'm just about to go to 1Gb, with max of 5:1 contention. At work we have 2G with 5:1, and in all circumstances the site is fast, with the single exception of looking at all forum posts in last 24 (or xx) hours - which implies the only bottleneck is with the IPC database (?MySQL) that holds the forum - it's just possible that it would benefit from more power.

I do agree that hosting the user images (avatars on other systems) would potentially speed up the loading of an individual thread - but only the first time each individual was referenced, as thereafter it is likely to be cached locally - except for those users who dont cache anything - now that WOULD make the system feel slow, as all graphics would be downloaded every time.

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I have to agree with you Brett, even out here in the colonies the speed is pretty good.

Now, if the ybw mags could just get on the news stands a bit quicker than the 2-3 months we are behind you guys, that would be really nice (September are the currently displayed issues, October PBO just appeared)!

John

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Speed

Once onto the forums, I don't have a problem, it is before that. I enter the site at the main index page and the header, ybw.com logo and the blue-yellow-blue horizontal stripes load almost immediately. There is then a pause of anything up to ten seconds before the forum menu loads. This is on broadband and a clean machine - it also happens when laptop is used as well - so I doubt it is down to configuration.

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Re: Posting pictures

Just a thought. Does ybw cache pictures, even caching user pics would help?

Users pics shoud be pretty small anyway, but caching them locally would help.

<hr width=100% size=1>For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three
 
Database and pictures

We're looking at the structure of the database right now. Quite apart from posts being filed there is a lot of searching going on these days, some of it on common keywords, and that goes some way to stressing the database at peak times. There are any number of ways we can tackle such issues and those are being examined at the moment. Aside from code and hardware solutions a quick fix would be to time limit the searchable archive but I am personally against that. An intensive task would be to start to edit out the older dross and that might be an option.

It all seems a bit 50:50 in terms of experience, namely some users are not getting the best connections and at peak times (lunchtime, late afternoon and some evenings GMT) we are slower to deliver some of the forum pages, especially if they are loaded with remotely hosted images and/or are requested in a long string of flat format posts or threads. The slow delivery of post acknowledgement pages is also being looked at, although there is a solution, namely to hit submit and then check immediately to see if your post has been entered...in almost every case it will have been...the acknowledgement screen is just a courtesy and not necessary to ensure the correct filing of the post. If logging in on slow connections I also tend to use multiple windows to ease download times a bit.

In terms of user pics we won't be offering hosting for these at this time, despite that enabling us to offer a level of control of delivery times and, perhaps, to cap image memory size. Although images are relatively easy to firewall we would have security issues to overcome and it would certainly present numerous copyright headaches.


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Re: Some answers

If lunch time is your peak then how does just two postings on this thread at lunchtime support that claim?

Phil

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Re: Some answers

This is just one thread out of tens of thousands on 20 forums in total. The vast majority of people are also viewing posts, not adding them

<hr width=100% size=1>For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three
 
Peak not just posts

Placing posts is not the most important load on the database...searching is far heavier and also just straightforward viewing from many people calling info as they call pages, especially in flat mode where we deliver several messages at once.

I have no reason to lie about this -- our server load at lunchtimes GMT is high and for fairly obvious reasons.

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Re: Some answers

FWIW Kim, I use broadband NTL in England and your site and subsequent pages always load pretty well instantaneously. As others have suggested, maybe it's an isp problem.

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