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Forum Connection Errors & Member Pruning


Steve Herschbach

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Steve,appreciate all the work that you do with the site/forum......thanks alot.

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I see you're interested in saving bandwidth. I'm no web expert, but did help Wally find a few issues with Tom D's forum.
So a few little things I noticed on your site:
On the right side of most pages, there's the 'recent classified', and 'other forum posts' section, all of which have users avatar in miniature. These are actually downloaded as the full-size avatar images, so they total up to a few 100k filesize. Could the avatar simply be replaced by a big black dot, as it is on the left side listing? Related to this, when viewing the Classified page, all the 'recent classified' ads are duplicated on the right, needlessly.

And your 'smileys' are massive, 120 pixels wide, some of them, with corresponding filesizes of 15k + . Example the 'oh my' one:
B127B4D7-8A68-4C90-8D23-64D33BD6E023.png
The 'like' thumbs-up is 7K:
react_like.png
These could all be resized to more appropriate dimensions and hopefully smaller file sizes.

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Yes, that is by intent because the forum has to adjust automatically to work on a tiny cell phone or a 28” PC screen. There are either multiple images stored and served depending on the device, or one large image that is sized down to fit all devices. Small images would upsize and look really rough. I use generous photo limits for the same reason. People post large photos, and they look good on a phone or a PC and that’s good... I love pictures. It is a big reason I chose Invision as I was having real issues on my own trying to code the site to work properly on a zillion different devices and browsers. It’s gotten crazy and now Invision handles all that for me. Many things like that are built into the forum software and I don’t want to modify or mess with that much as it causes me more issues down the road when Invision upgrades, which is several times a year normally. Sticking with their base offering with as few mods or add ones as possible prevents things conflicting or reverting back due to overwrites when future upgrades occur.

I do keep an eye for large images but in my case that means ones 1MB and over and more realistically 4MB and larger.

Actually it’s not a bandwidth problem so much as a concurrent connections problem mostly. I have huge bandwidth limits I’m not even close to. I like having all the bells and whistles stuff and am willing to pay for the server horsepower to drive it. I am mainly looking to clear deadwood; unused stuff. The main problem I believe is being on a shared database server and I have no idea who else is on the server and how heavy their database use is. So that has to get fixed first before I can even really get a serious handle on other stuff.

Bottom line is it appears Wally has more constraints he has to work within, which is why everyone there has to use a separate photo service, and I don’t have that problem. Mostly I have been lax in housekeeping because of that and now it’s time to catch up and clean house. Sometimes stuff like a photo gallery seems like a great idea, but if it’s really not getting used then I may as well ditch it. 80/20 rule at work, where can I save the most with the least effort or impact to the areas that really are seeing member use.

But I really do appreciate the suggestions. I don’t want to sound like a know it all and that I can’t use those! :smile:

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1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Simultaneous members online at once has been climbing rather rapidly. 133 on the site as I type, and that alone may be causing connection refusals due to the forum being on a shared database server.

I don't exactly know what 'simultaneous' means in terms of server usage.  When my computer browser is running (~14 hrs / day) I always have a tab with this website.  Would it help if I closed the tab and then reconnected when I want to access the site (which would cut it down to being on ~12 hr / day ?)?

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No. Nobody should have to do anything at all. It’s all on me and my end to fix :smile:

The forum is simply growing and I need to take it up a notch. There are far larger forums that this on the internet with zillions of users. My discussions with the hosting folks revolve around the forum being here for the next 20 years so I want to make a big jump now so I don’t have to fuss with it for at least the next 5 years.

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