It looks like at least part of the slowness of the forums recently is because they scripts take an awful long time to run (on certain occasions). As part of the debugging process, I’ve removed certain features (specifically Prev In Thread / Next In Thread and the “COPA Member” indication icon) to see if backing out these changes improves performance.
So I’d like to leave it like this through the beginning of the week to see whether the slowness issues get better, worse, or stay the same.
I went through both the public and member forums this morning and the member forum was significantly slower. May have just been coincidence or maybe that explains the difference in observations on speed.
I have noticed a difference when I logged on this morning - it is consistently faster - I used to get a great variation in the speed - sometimes it was very rapid (for some messages) and sometimes very slow (within the same session).
Thanks for the feedback, guys. I think we should wait another half week or so (to experience some week-day traffic/load in addition to the weekend).
It may be that we might need to get rid of the “COPA Member” icon and/or some of the other extra features I’ve put in (next/prev in thread for example) until I can figure out how to do it without increasing the load on the servers.
But we’ll need to wait another few days before being able to pass any judgements.
Same here. In addition, I’ve noticed that none of the message symbols are green to indicate that it’s a message that I have not read yet, even through the main screen indicates that there are new messages.
The company claimed that server load was peaking when some of the scripts I had modified were being run. That’s why I “un-modified” them over the weekend, but it’s obviously still a problem.
Today the issue appeared to be that the SQL server on which the forum content is based was unable to handle the volume of requests being made of it (from us as well as from other customers of the hosting company).
I will call them now – though it might be tomorrow before I can talk to a live person – and see what we can do about the problem.
It might mean switching providers, but if that’s the case it might be kinda painful (simply because setting up SQL databases and getting the entire environment on the web server set up correctly elsewhere will take a little time).
I’ll keep you guys posted and apologize for the problems.
Steve:
Thank you in advance for your hard work on this. It is obvious that the slow speed is something outside the archtecture of this website. Keep us posted on progress.
brian