Forum Connection Errors & Member Pruning

[Steve Herschbach]

I and probably many of you have been experiencing forum connection issues recently. Some of it was a database server crash, and part of it a corrupted file due to the crash.

However, the forum database is also getting large, over 2GB now. I May do a prune of all members who have not logged in or posted in over a year. This has not been done in years so there are thousands of inactive accounts taking up space. If you have not logged in or posted in over a year now is the time, otherwise your account may disappear. You can see the forum without an account though you can’t download files and such. Bottom line is if you are not logging in or posting you don’t need an account so I will be cleaning that up very soon. I figure a year is long enough to be reasonable but if anyone thinks that’s too little please speak up!

I am also going to delete the photo gallery. It gets very little use but is a resource hog. 90% of the photos there are mine, and I may move them to my personal website then link there. Almost no members are using the Gallery and it is a separate module I pay for on top of the other forum costs. I suspect most members don’t even know it exists. So that’s going away unless you all rise up in protest! 

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. So concurrent with the above I am working with my hosting service to move from a shared database server to my own VPS dedicated database server. This will help protect the forum performance from being impacted perhaps by other server users (and them by us), and allow me to isolate and more easily diagnose any issues here.

Add all this up and we should all see better forum access and speed very soon. To anyone experiencing these issues, my apologies. The good news is that this is all because the forum is growing while most seem to be shrinking, so in a weird way I’m happy to be bumping into server limits. Just wanted to let you all know I do pay attention to this stuff and try to do what is needed to keep things humming along smoothly.

 

[fredmason]

Thanks Steve 

I was wondering what was going on..

 I just figured it was some how my fault...

fred

[RickUK]

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

[PimentoUK]

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:

The 'like' thumbs-up is 7K:

These could all be resized to more appropriate dimensions and hopefully smaller file sizes.

[Swegin]

Prune away Boss.   

[Steve Herschbach]

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! 

[GB_Amateur]

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 ?)?

[Steve Herschbach]

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

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.

[Steve Herschbach]

OK, bit the bullet and did the database move and nothing else yet. That will be interesting in itself to see what happens. Sorry again for the downtime but progress being made! 

[Steve Herschbach]

Well, seems snappier so far. Fingers crossed.