Some PALGN tech updates

[Discosis]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd post a brief note regarding PALGN's servers.

I've made some changes over the past month that I think have had a positive effect on page load times (indeed, the good old "PALGN really slow" thread has finally fallen off Page 1 of the General forum).

For the techies, some details:

Some basic stuff was changed mid-January:
- RSS feeds are now generated offline every 5 minutes
- Whos Online is now updated every 2 minutes

I also added some performance tracking at the time to allow me to log slow page loads and DB queries. On January 28 I made some further configuration changes designed to stop search bots indexing some pages that ran particularly heavy and slow queries on the site, locking a bunch of DB tables. Amusingly, the heavy queries centered around the +/- voting system that applies to each message ... every vote you cast kills the server! (Ok thats a bit dramatic)

Anyway, hopefully you've seen some improvement in page load times.

Here's some averages based on my logs:
Jan-23: 12.09
Jan-24: 6.79
Jan-25: 4.82
Jan-26: 2.93
Jan-27: 3.73
Jan-28: 1.81
Jan-29: 0.61
Jan-30: 0.42
Jan-31: 0.50
Feb-1: 0.37
Feb-2: 0.39
Feb-3: 0.61
Feb-4: 0.44
(you get the idea)

As the page generation times fell, we were also able to serve more pages to more browsers - on Feb 10 the site served twice as many hits as January 23. (Looks like something big happened on Feb 10, right?)

While these numbers are encouraging, we're not out of the woods - the changes were a bandaid, this is still an old and mostly unmaintained codebase and there's still the odd long-loading page.

I'm looking to move PALGN to the new server in the next week. There's been a litany of delays on this owing to things like domain name ownership, DNS delegation, Christmas holidays, health, and I've been seeking some clarifications regarding important services. But we're finally ready.

I'll be aiming to do this with a minimum of downtime but some will be unavoidable -- I'll post further updates regarding the server transition when I have firmer details.

Jason

Edit - My grammar skills are poor at 1am

[BurnZ]

[GooberMan]

Indeed. Truth be told, it's been as bad as it's ever been at times of heavy load (ie Roland makes another community-provoking post) but I've just not seen the point in complaining.
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[Esposch]

I don't know if that's marketing wank or what, but he's impressed me. I've only had one or two huge waits over the past week or so.
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[Benza]

does anyone else find it hilarious that the tech guy is better at communicating with the forum then the guy who held a position as chief marketing manager for 2 years?
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[Esposch]

[Benza]

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[Charly]

I have found the speed of the forms to be pretty slow, these past two days especially.
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[Jim Dash]

What speed improvements?

Good job patching the servers, people have still been leaving.

[mikezilla2]

there is so much spin on palgn i cant tell if we are in a front loading or top loading washing machine
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[vizzini111]

i've actually noticed a big speed increase for the past couple of weeks, i haven't had to wait longer then a second for a page to load for at least a week, and this was even during the peak times when threads and posts were popping up everywhere over the last few days