we’ve noticed that this forum is overheating our entire site. slowtwitch already gets an awful lot of traffic, and this forum has recently exploded in terms of its own traffic. add to that the more complex script of our new forum and the whole thing is slowing down a bit.
so within a day or two we’re going to stick a lot of additional RAM into our server, which we hope will keep the forum from bogging down, as it occasionally is doing. we’re also going to take another look at the new forum script, and see if there’s any functionality that is serving to be a memory hog, and which we ought to strip out.
thanks for your patience, and if the site’s down sometime within the next day or two, it’s because you’re visiting while the box is out of the rack and having its new memory installed. come back in 15 or 20 minutes.
I’ve noticed that the new forum pages take a long time to load. I’ve used different browsers, platforms and internet connections. It just boils down to the fact that the page design of the new forum software is EXTREMELY html-heavy, and the browsers take a long time to render all that html onto the page. The heavy html also makes for much larger file sizes, which could slow down the server big-time even if the number of page views is the same.
Aside from occasional (and normal for any website) lag time when opening a message string, I haven’t really noticed any difference speed wise between this new forum and the old one. Of course, I’m sitting in front of a newer computer with a healthy amount of RAM and a cable modem.
Have you run benchmark/load tests on your server to make sure that RAM is the problem? It could be a connexion issue, your processor struggling to keep up with the load, or any number of potential bottlenecks in your system. A little bit of testing is something you may want to consider before just throwing money in the form of RAM at the problem…
we serve our pages from a dedicated server run by a small web host. the admin there seems to think it’s a RAM issue. we do have a fair bit of html in our pages, and quite a bit has been stripped out already. we can strip out more, i think. we’ll just keep dinking around, and probably the performance will just get incrementally better.
it’s not that bad, but it could be better and i don’t think there’s any one thing that is the magic fix. we’ll be at it pretty-well constantly.
I’m no expert, but I’ve heard CGI script-based bulletin board app’s can be CPU hogs. I’m a web host reseller and the Acceptable Use Policy forbids their use. They do allow PHP solutions such as phpbb.