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Subject: Lagging? Import old threads?

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FiZzBaW

Forum Moderator

Posts:61

10/10/2007 11:21 AM
1) Are the forums really laggy for anyone else? or is it just me? I find that the site "hangs up" or gets stuck on me a lot and lags more often then not. Just wondering if we are on a temp server, or if this is how the site is going to perform, because the temp. forum we had ran much faster and was much more responsive. I don't think its my Internet connection, because I have the same issue from home or from here on the University's Internet network. 2) Is it possible to import the posts from the temp. forum we had? A lot of topics where created with a good bit of responses. If not, we need to be sure what forum software we are using, before we ask people to start posting again. Having to start over again is definitely a morale killer for me. -FiZz

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admin account User is Offline

Forum Admin
JKI Website Admin

Posts:331

10/10/2007 10:25 PM
Thanks for the feedback. That is one of the things I am watching. As to lagging, there is a page generation tag at the bottom of the page you can use to see overall performance. Occasionally, I see pages loading slowly, most pages according to page generation load in a reasonable amount of time. There is a bit of overhead due to the additional security and privileges, but generally not so much to explain any significantly noticeable lag. The site is on shared hosting and for the feature list (unlimited bandwidth, etc) I didn’t see the same options near this price range. If we find a better solution elsewhere we can move servers. We have a couple possibilities opening up around years’ end. This is a case of good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two. It isn’t fair to compare this platform to one only running a thin bbs. The way data is generated this system performs slower when there are no users online (the software runtime compiles). On old forums: It generally is possible to move forums (presuming you can access the data), however, the problem with merging threads from other boards is keeping some sense of thread identity and integrity. Threads do not really exist apart from their owner IDs (e.g. log in names). This poses the problem of who to link the threads to? The Login IDs which aren’t registered at jerichojki.com (temp url) do not exist at jerichojki.com. So at minimum we’d need access to the data from Jericho-kansas (shouldn’t be a problem) that data has to be unencrypted (with the possible exception of passwords). The data would have to be prepped, scripted, or put in some intermediary format so it could be imported. In addition, user accounts would need to be created for all posters. Then that data would have to be massaged into the new database. These last two are by far the most time consuming. This is not slight effort for the 320 posts on the old forums and I can’t see it happening anytime soon. One intermediary step might be if you want to create logs of the boards and post those. If you want to take the lead and see what mechanisms exist for Simple Machines Forum export or scripting that would speed things up a bit. Let me know if you find out anything.

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FiZzBaW

Forum Moderator

Posts:61

10/11/2007 10:48 AM
Thanks for the reply. The site is looking great by the way! Today everything seems to be loading really quickly, perhaps I was just on at bad times the last two days. Not sure, but I totally understand what you are saying about good, fast, or cheap. You have to just do the best you can with the resources you have. I was simply curious as to importing of the posts from the old forum. I know we had it done when the site I administrate moved over from one platform to another, but it was an entire database migration. So, while it was complicated, everything just rolled over. After reading your reply, I think it would likely be best not to worry about those post. Essentially that board was just communication between members of the committee so I am confident, that when this site goes public, we will generate plenty of threads. I'm off to comb through some rules from HT to see what could apply here. -FiZz

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admin account User is Offline

Forum Admin
JKI Website Admin

Posts:331

10/11/2007 7:18 PM
There are a few avenues for lag, and a couple of them might be different than most are used to. The database is a possible issue as it resides on a separate server. Being on a separate server it is far more difficult to get a sense of how it is performing. On the other hand, this server setup is very extensible so should we wind up with lots of traffic we can expand to meet it. We’re using MSSQL the same database which drives amazon.com among other sites. One type of lag which is frustrating and confusing to most, is startup lag. This occurs should the application be dropped from memory (unfortunately something which happens more often in a shared environment). Should this happen, this is when it takes about a full minute or more when you go to the homepage and nothing comes right up. This may or may not have happened to you as of yet. To mitigate this somewhat, I run an application on my computer which loads in the home page every 5 minutes to try to keep the application active. Eventually, I’ll be adding in other mechanisms to try to keep it from getting dropped. I just checked the logs for the site and the site seems to be doing amazingly well today. I’m not showing any restarts when normally there are quite a few. How do you feel about trying to recreate the non-historical threads here? Like the pet ones. And if you think any threads have historical significance what do you think about an archive here? I could, I suspect, save the html output and keep the formatting of those threads. I’ve also realized that as more people come in, I should have an explanation of what the goals are of the site and why certain choices were made. So I’ll write that up and post it.

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airassault101 User is Offline

Forum Moderator
JKI Director

Posts:321

10/22/2007 10:24 AM
I have noticed lag as well. I like the new improvements. I.E. quick reply box.

"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have." --Ronald Reagan

admin account User is Offline

Forum Admin
JKI Website Admin

Posts:331

10/22/2007 6:02 PM
Unfortunately, without the lag being consistent it is much harder to get the host to do anything. I noticed some lag about two days ago where for a good time the page load times were really slow 20 seconds or more. To note that is server lag and page draw takes a bit longer than that. For instance when the page load says under a second it still takes maybe 3-5 seconds for the page to draw. So I wrote the host and their response was that the site wasn’t currently slow. Which frankly pissed me off. I’ll keep sending in such reports when I feel the site is taking too long, if only to establish some track record. To some extent the site will generally be a tad bit on the slow side for the reasons given above. Should we start getting a fair amount of traffic we can move to a faster server, but as I’ve indicated, for now my goal is to keep costs down until we know JKI can easily afford any new costs on a long term basis. If anyone has a computer they leave running most of the time (running some sort of Microsoft OS) and doesn’t mind running a keep alive application let me know. The keep alive app help keeps the web application in the server memory, which is the real time eater. If the app isn’t in memory it can easily take over a minute for the home page to load. I’ve also recently subscribed to a host tracking service to check lag and will have those results to follow the issue.

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