[Suggestion] Remedying the busy server

Jack's Smirking Revenge

Jack's Smirking Revenge

i am the one who knocks
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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?
 
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
 
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?
 
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. ^.^
 
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.
 
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. :)
 
I like having it so I can predict lulz :monster:

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
 
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.
 
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.
 
If you need support i'm all up for it. I've had it happen to me a couple oftimes, sometimes i refresh andma straight back on, sometimes i have to wait ages a few hours for it to work. So ye Take off the whos viewing what. :)
 
Belazor said:
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.
Click to expand...
Ah well, my mistake.
Does the shoutbox not only run queries for online members though? So it can't be THAT bad can it?
 
It only runs queries for members that are either using the SB (1 query for fetching, 1 for inserting), or idling on the index.php page (but only for like 5 minutes or however long the idle timeout is).

Still, that's by FAR less queries than thread views, considering not THAT many people browse threads at the same time.
 
Shouldn't the shoutbox logically stop fetching queries every one second if there is only a single member on the SB? I see where you're coming from, Belazor, but it doesn't make sense that the server would keep checking for messages when there's nobody else that would post them.
 
It's been getting a little better to be honest, but I've had a couple of instances when the server has died on me. It's not as frequent as it was though.
 
Alot better than the older servers.
Although i don't like the advert at the top.
 
Tyler Durden said:
It's been getting a little better to be honest, but I've had a couple of instances when the server has died on me. It's not as frequent as it was though.
Click to expand...

Really? Because last night when I was in the SB the server actually killed the SB. In the box where the SB is, it put in the normal FFF page that says "server is too busy"...so I probably could have gone to my User CP right in the SB.

Gabranth said:
Alot better than the older servers.
Although i don't like the advert at the top.
Click to expand...

It looks really tacky. Isn't there at least a way to move it to the side of the page so it doesn't take up that huge chunk at the top?
 
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