[Suggestion] Remedying the busy server

September 16, 2007, 10:06 PM

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's getting a bit annoyed at this (since the new server should be better than the last, in theory). So to remedy it, I thought that removing the "Who's Viewing a thread" hack would help to speed things up, since that's a pretty big bandwidth whore.
Yay or nay?

My Character Profiles · September 16, 2007, 11:48 PM

How badly does that slow the forums down anyway. Since you seem to know. ^.^

I never really cared who was viewing what thread anyhow. XD

September 16, 2007, 11:55 PM

Well everytime someone views a thread or views a new page, the hack has to query the database for every member in it, and then return the results for who's viewing.

And that's a fair point too; who actually uses that feature at all?

My Character Profiles · September 16, 2007, 11:57 PM

Well I didn't know it slowed the forums down so bad. ^.^
Maybe it would be a good idea to eliminate that feature. =o

I would rather have more fun profile perks than the ability to see who's viewing what thread. ^.^

September 16, 2007, 11:58 PM

Yeah, it's a proven one that. It the server on ACF when it was installed there. It used to go out for about 15 minutes at a time. It was removed, there was never another server problem.
It could at least be done for a trial.

September 17, 2007, 4:19 AM

Very good suggetion from a smart man! i saw remove it because i never use it as well. I say get rid of it so there's less stlakres. I hope this server speeds up a bit. LeeD and Ivan.

September 17, 2007, 5:40 AM

I like having it so I can predict lulz

But the busy server messages don't bother me all that much. Since I know it's going to be a bitch for a couple of minutes, I run off somewhere and do something else.

But, I'm all for whatever is decided. xD

September 17, 2007, 6:27 AM

Ya I use it to see if any invisible people are on

September 17, 2007, 7:23 AM

I never pay attention to it, and the busy server thing pisses me off because it never seems to pop up until I hit the Reply button. I say do away with the hack, see if it helps, if not you can put it back.

September 17, 2007, 7:52 AM

First of all, it doesn't require "installing" as it's already a part of vBulletin. It's just an option that needs to be enabled.
Secondly, given that it is querying indexed fields, it's actually not that big of a performance hit. The performance hit comes when there's hundreds of users viewing the same thread, as the server has to return a larger query.

The reason for the Server Busy pages is not only the fact that the forum is capped at a load limit of 5 by default (normal server load is between 0.4 and 1.4), but because the Shoutbox, during busy hours, has to make tens, if not hundreds of queries every second.
For every single user viewing the index page, the shoutbox does 1 query per second (it may be more than one, but I know for a fact it must check the database for new shouts). This goes on for like 5 minutes, before the user is flagged Idle and doesn't see SB updates until he refreshes the main page, or posts a shout (like the infamous dot).

What's a bigger performance hit:
A relatively small query that's being ran once on thread view
-or-
One query per second for every user on the main page for 5 minutes

..yeah.