WHAT is it going to take to make these forums run smooth?

[Shawnski]

Please, let the user community know what we need to do to help out. The perpetual lagging, brutal refresh rates, etc are killing the experience we all enjoy here.

What do you need to help out? A dedicated server? What? How much?

You have an army of posters here. How can we help? The status quo lately isn't cutting it.... and that is NOT any disrespect to Scottie, Photon, Bingo or others that do their best to keep this site up and running, but it is clear something is very, very wrong lately.

Spell it out to us.... Please.

[BlackArcher101]

I agree.... the performance is just disgusting. If this were a game and we were Sutter, someone would be in the press box!

edit: Not to harp on anyone specific as well. But something really needs to be done about it. New hardware? New hosting company? More money? Server upgrades? SQL problems? Hmmm, only took me 40 seconds to open the edit window to do this.

[LeftWing]

Right, what we need is a fund-raising thermometer. Those are always the best.

Just let me know, I'd chip in for some performance enhancing goodness.

[Flame On]

A campaign would seem warrented and would be welcome I'm sure.

[habernac]

yeah, brutal response times today. I'm not even checking the forum as it's annoyingly slow. Just kick off all the damn newbies.

:D

[notoepik]

Slowness is brutal, but the thing that is most irritating is my IP being blocked. I hate that.

[Eagle Eye]

Just looking at the other thread "problems viewing CP' How do I know if I am doing something that I shouldn't when I log on to CP (I am just using regular old Explorer).

Over the last 4-5 days (seems to be getting worse) it takes sometimes up to 10 minutes for a page to load, seems weird that this has never happened before.

[Mango]

Does anyone have any ideas for a campaign/pledge drive? I understand not everyone will want to participate, but I know a lot of people want to help.

[OilKiller]

Took me over and hour just to try and view this thread. Who knows if this post will even be posted. It's too bad. This is a great site, but an hour to view a thread? Most times I can't even get any pages to load at all.

[Shin Pad]

Viewing these boards for me, was fine until last evening during the Sharks game - I just couldn't get on the boards and when I did, it took forever. Today - the same thing. Count me in if any help is required to make things run smoothly.

[ricosuave]

i concur, to all the disapointments, and to the fund raising.

i think, as ive seen on other boards, that you have to wait a certain amount of time before youre allowed to post, maybe that would help?

also, i dont know how much sigs and avatars hold us back, but how about a scale of number of posts to being able to have a sig and or avatar? ie, if youve got 10000 posts, you have it all, if you have 12, sorry....

thoughts?

i may, and i stress may, have something worthy to donate to an auction if that angle is pursued.

rico

[BlackArcher101]

also, i dont know how much sigs and avatars hold us back, but how about a scale of number of posts to being able to have a sig and or avatar? ie, if youve got 10000 posts, you have it all, if you have 12, sorry....

thoughts?

i may, and i stress may, have something worthy to donate to an auction if that angle is pursued.

rico
Avatars and Sigs generally don't cause problems since they are hosted off site. It slows the loading on your personal pc, but doesn't slow the loading of the forum page. It appears to be the server hardware or the server software. Pinging the URL last night gave me a steady 90ms, so to the connection is fine. Looks to be internally within the server.

[KevanGuy]

Thanks for all the offers of support everyone. Details to come soon.

[rockstar]

It seems to be running fairly well (for me) tonight. Which is a nice change.

But yes, let us know.

[Pagal4321]

Do tell us where and when Kev.
I will eat as many Junior Hamburgers as it takes.

THE SLOWNESS MUST GO!

[Shawnski]

OK, so the "runaway process" has been addressed? That worked... sort of...

And now we have a potential onslaught of "official" forum posters.....

However, I am not seeing a "root cause" here folks. The army is ready, the generals are stalling!! :w00t:

As the thread indicates... What is it going to take to make these forums run smooth??

If you don't want to discuss it here, fine, but take it up elsewhere with those that can help.

I am tired of seeing the "White Screen Of Death"!!!! (Win95 reference intended....)

[KevanGuy]

We're working on it.

[Ironhorse]

If $$ for new hardware is an issue, how about offering sponsorship accounts (sponsorship = more privileges / features)? Some of the other boards I'm on have them, and I would imagine it would help with the 'ol cash flow...

Just thinking out loud.

[Flash Walken]

Just don't go overboard like lowtax

[evman150]

I'd be willing to toss 10 or 20 bucks towards making this place run smoother.

[brucebeh]

i don't know if this stuff is already installed but.....

Zend Optimizer (i guess you have this since you guys are on vbulletin)
PHP Accelerator

And a few others i seem to have forgotten ATM, but they help a LOT.

Oh, have you guys spent some time tweaking your mysql server, that can improve things by a LOT.

[scottie]

brucebeh: done and done! :)

[photon]

And done on the MySQL and Apache tuning as well.

[brucebeh]

woops, i lied, i just looked through my emails with my own server noc, its actually called, "eAccelerator"

Sorry.. but they both do essentially the same thing.

What you guys should also do is, get a shared hosting account somewhere and host your main site on that, and use the vps JUST for this forum.

[Buff]

My company started to host a new website. It was getting so many hits that it was working slowly and all the other sites on that server and one other server we have was running slowly.

My boss bought a brand new server just for that new website, and delivered it to a place with a fiber connection and everything worked itself out. No more performance issues.

If somehow you could get the cp server on a fiber backbone...

[scottie]

Buff,

No kidding!

Oh, was that an offer? ;)

[scottie]

Realistically it'll take US$150 - US$200 every month.

[brucebeh]

^^

yeah, that's a good price point to get a very decent server dedicated to this forum.. it'll mean, fast speeds even with about 500 people online :)

[Flash Walken]

I'm just going to take a guess, but I think that's a little bit out of the budget, and to be quite frank, I think it's above need.

[KevanGuy]

I'm just going to take a guess, but I think that's a little bit out of the budget, and to be quite frank, I think it's above need.

How do you know what is or isnt 'above need'?

[Flash Walken]

How do you know what is or isnt 'above need'?
Just speculation, like speculation on the budget, I could be horribly horribly wrong, or I could be closer to correct than I ever imagined.

The point I was making was, I don't think the traffic levels are a problem at any other time than game-day when everyone is constantly refreshing the gamethread/gameday thread/threads after the game. Paying for all that increased bandwidth and hosting for a 5 hour period out of 48 doesn't seem like a realistic option to me, maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll shut my mouth.

Again, just my $.02 as a new poster here.

[photon]

Just speculation, like speculation on the budget, I could be horribly horribly wrong, or I could be closer to correct than I ever imagined.

The point I was making was, I don't think the traffic levels are a problem at any other time than game-day when everyone is constantly refreshing the gamethread/gameday thread/threads after the game. Paying for all that increased bandwidth and hosting for a 5 hour period out of 48 doesn't seem like a realistic option to me, maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll shut my mouth.

Again, just my $.02 as a new poster here.

There's been some other times where the traffic has had a significant impact. If it was only game threads I might be inclined to agree, but this week trade deadline is another perfect example. I'll know the Flames picked up Jokinen from Florida not because I read it here, but because I won't be able to get in to even see what the server load is let alone read the thread :/ Given a choice, personally I want as pain free a experince as possible for users.

Plus if we go deep in the playoffs it'll be even more. PLUS if the main site doesn't have a forum, they're ALL going to come here.

*shudder*

[Flash Walken]

There's been some other times where the traffic has had a significant impact. If it was only game threads I might be inclined to agree, but this week trade deadline is another perfect example. I'll know the Flames picked up Jokinen from Florida not because I read it here, but because I won't be able to get in to even see what the server load is let alone read the thread :/ Given a choice, personally I want as pain free a experince as possible for users.

Plus if we go deep in the playoffs it'll be even more. PLUS if the main site doesn't have a forum, they're ALL going to come here.

*shudder*

heh, ya, I thought about that for playoffs too, it's going to be nuts.

Might I be so bold as to ask about the front page's stats compared to the forum? I think it's probably likely that atleast a few users go to www.calgarypuck.com/ and then click the forum link...I don't know any of the hosting details, or how the ad traffic relates to the calgarypuck domain but I'm wondering if maybe a sort of 'shell' start page hosted on some throwaway webspace (like a $5 a month startlogic host or something) could be used just for www.calgarypuck.com and have the server hosted somewhere else? Hell, it might already be like this and I'm just looking like a doofus, but maybe that would be enough to compensate?

Another thing I thought might be nice would be java applet for IRC. Might be nice to maybe replace game threads (or atleast, if the server dies/overloads) to be done on IRC. When CP went down a couple of weeks ago for a day or whatever, I thought of setting one up on dalnet or efnet, buuuutttt then I just got lazy and didn't do it. Not like it's difficult or something special, but I sit on IRC all day anyway, so if you thought it might be prudent, I could go ahead and register the chan and Idle there as op all day or what-have-you.

[brucebeh]

Admins, I found a great reliable place for great dedicated servers, the cost range is about $80/mth just a little higher than what you guys are paying now for your VPS.

AMD Sempron 2600+
512 ram, 1000GB Bandwidth
80 gb hard drive
10mbit connection ($10 more for 100mbit)

PM me about this or add me on msn... i think it will greatly suit your needs and not blow your budget at the same time.

[photon]

heh, ya, I thought about that for playoffs too, it's going to be nuts.

Might I be so bold as to ask about the front page's stats compared to the forum? I think it's probably likely that atleast a few users go to www.calgarypuck.com/ (http://www.calgarypuck.com/) and then click the forum link...I don't know any of the hosting details, or how the ad traffic relates to the calgarypuck domain but I'm wondering if maybe a sort of 'shell' start page hosted on some throwaway webspace (like a $5 a month startlogic host or something) could be used just for www.calgarypuck.com (http://www.calgarypuck.com) and have the server hosted somewhere else? Hell, it might already be like this and I'm just looking like a doofus, but maybe that would be enough to compensate?

Another thing I thought might be nice would be java applet for IRC. Might be nice to maybe replace game threads (or atleast, if the server dies/overloads) to be done on IRC. When CP went down a couple of weeks ago for a day or whatever, I thought of setting one up on dalnet or efnet, buuuutttt then I just got lazy and didn't do it. Not like it's difficult or something special, but I sit on IRC all day anyway, so if you thought it might be prudent, I could go ahead and register the chan and Idle there as op all day or what-have-you.

The front page of course sees far fewer page views (because it only takes one page view to read an article and digest its contents, while each thread will have hundreds to thousands of page views over its lifetime, and there are hundreds of new threads each week), and it's not very resource intensive so it's really not a big issue. It's the forums that consume the resources.

As for an IRC channel if there's one out there that people use that's ok, but we don't want to have any sort of official or sanctioned CP IRC channel at this time.

[scottie]

Admins, I found a great reliable place for great dedicated servers, the cost range is about $80/mth just a little higher than what you guys are paying now for your VPS.

AMD Sempron 2600+
512 ram, 1000GB Bandwidth
80 gb hard drive
10mbit connection ($10 more for 100mbit)

PM me about this or add me on msn... i think it will greatly suit your needs and not blow your budget at the same time.

Hi brucebeh,

Thanks for your suggestion. However, the price is less than our current hosting and the server is less powerful (well, less suitable). For example, we can currently (and regularly do) burst up to 2Gb of ram ...

[habernac]

getting hammered by "server is busy" errors. Anyone else?

[photon]

Yeah, I put a cap on the server load... That cap is probably 25 times what a normal server should be running at but it's still capped.

[habernac]

very frustrating today. I've pretty much given up trying to read a thread as it takes 5 minutes or more to access.

In fact, it took me 5 minutes just to post this...

:confused:

[photon]

I don't know why but it's actually been pretty smooth for me. But server loads are running super high and we've come very close to breaking 500 concurrent users.

[4X4]

In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I'm not going to post that I just simply couldn't access the forums (for more than 5 minutes here and there) the past couple of days. I'm not going to speculate that the influx of noobs and the trade deadline pushed the server into territory that it can't handle. I'm not going to complain that my crack has been watered down with icing sugar (and I'm not going to give credit to whoever (probably fotze) first made that remark). And I won't bother wondering out loud whether the playoffs will be even worse that the trade deadline.

What I am going to do is suggest that one time donations are handy, but they probably don't teach the 'new' server to fish.

Is it possible to have accounts that are connected to paypal or something, that we could voluntarily pay a penny a post? Really, it's not much to the addicts, but it's gotta add up for the admin. If 100 of us addicts actually signed up for this and between us we made 200 posts per day (that's 2 posts each, Einstein).... 60 bucks per month for the server, a buck twenty is what is cost the addicts. For a month of crack. Even heavy posters wouldn't be spending more than a couple bucks a month.

OR... As previously suggested... Just some kind of flat rate per year. Fawk... You know that at least a a quarter of us will pay it. 10 bucks per year. No big hit to our individual pocketbooks, but with 300 of us paying it, thats 3 grand a year or 250 a month...
Give the paying guys a shiny star by their name and they're happy. Better yet, give them the ability to have avatars or sigs and watch the money roll in.


Hell... Forget all of what I just said and do this... Let me pay 10 or 20 or fricken 50 bucks right now and guarantee that my IP is front of the line. (ok, that's probably impossible, but if it were possible, the sign-up rate for this would be phenominal. Heck, you'd have enough cash to buy a top of the line server that could handle so many posters that you'd never have to tell any of us that we are a bunch of morons who ALL think that we are front of the line.).

But please do something. I need this place for my hockey fix. NHL isn't exactly front page news over here...

[scottie]

4x4 -- execellent post. Even though I just got up, bleary-eyed 'cos I tuned in for the Dallas game, I'm laughing away to myself.

Anyway, your last point was this:
"But please do something."

And here's your (and everyone else's) answer: we are. We have some options, we're costing them out. Once we answer how much, we'll be able to tackle how. We have a bunch of ideas, which we'll be trying on for size over the next wee while. And then? You fine people find out what the shake-down will be. Fair enough? :)

[Flash Walken]

as was mentioned previously, I'd much rather have it capped and tell me it's busy than just hang forever.

I'm actually pretty impressed at how well it held up for the last couple of days, and don't see server downtime as such an issue, really.

This is a very well run forum.

[theJuice]

Hrm..stupid question, but was that "Win a Game Date thing" with Shawnski supposed to be the "Money drive" type of thing for the servers, or merely just one of many ideas that your kicking around. IE, you have another large donating type of plan, that you are currently considering.

[KevanGuy]

That was just a preliminary thing. We will do a larger drive before the playoffs

[Shazam]

Q: Are the DB and Web servers on different machines?

Q: Do you have a separate Apache process just for static content?

[Shazam]

And Semprons absolutely suck for servers.

[photon]

Lol.. yeah we'll probably go with Opterons.

To answer your questions currently no to both, we're on a VPS.

For what we are planning, we'll still have a single machine for the DB and web servers.. it'd be nice to seperate them but it's not necessary at this point. It'll likely be a dual core box as well.

For Apache, that's probably something we'd set up, though we really don't have that much static content (the front page will be moving to a CMS).

Or do you mean even having a seperate apache instance serving up the static components like images and stuff?

[Shazam]

it'd be nice to seperate them but it's not necessary at this point. I will tell you unequivocally that the best thing you can do is to separate the the DB and web servers.

Anything else you do will be a sub-optimal solution.

For Apache, that's probably something we'd set up, though we really don't have that much static contentI highly recommend it. Apache is very poor at releasing memory from third party processes (like PHP), and what happens is serving static content from the same process that serves dynamic content actually starts to slow down the dynamic content response.

There's lots of tutorials on the web about how to set it up. It's a very easy win for you.

[photon]

Cool, we'll look into the Apache thing then.

Unfortunately putting the two on seperate boxes is the only soluation at this point. As we grow it may become an option. I've seen significantly larger forums run on a single box though.

[Shazam]

Also, try turning off HTTP keep-alives. Every keep-alive requires a handle in memory.

And, are you running two VPS processes? Try switching to just one.

[photon]

I'm not sure how they have the server configured, but I believe we are under just one VPS process.

[scottie]

Yup, one process.

[Bobblehead]

A little late, but why isn't the Server Fund thermometer linked to the donation thread?

I wondered about that when I could see the .png but was still getting the "Server Busy" message. It is when that error pops up that I really want to donate (even though I already did).

[photon]

Sorry about that, I have to change a forum template and just haven't had a chance to go in and do it.. though kinda late now :)

[calculoso]

You know how there is the first line or two of a thread that pops up when the mouse is placed over the thread name? Has there been any experimentation with disabling that and seeing if that speeds things up?

[photon]

That's a REALLY good suggestion! I've never even noticed it but yeah it pulls the first post of every thread!

On the new server this stuff should all be no problem though.

[evman150]

Wow this reminds me of RFD with the no mouse over preview. Very annoying.

I realize it's not for very long. I'll live.

[4X4]

Is the torture over? I haven't been able to surf CP for a couple weeks now. The odd time, I managed to get into a thread, but it was taking a long time to load.
Like a true addict, I kept trying... And to my pleasent surprise, the forums are running great right now. Is the new server up or something? Or are the bandwagoners all gone...
I thought it'd be impossible to check the board today with an assumed influx of grease fans bragging about their dragon slaying.

Whatever the case, the forum is nice and fast. Grazie.

[photon]

Nope, still working on securing colocation. The cutover to the new server will hopefully take place after game 7 but before the start of the next series (God willing).

[CutThroat]

I run a few community type sites, one similar in size as this one. Forum Pruning helps, turning off the search function is another. As for getting rid of forum sigs and stuff...it takes away from the fun.

This is a great site with a good size user base. You should be able to make it profitable somehow. I created a calgary community site because I didn't know this one already existed; else I wouldn't have wasted my time. www.flames-hockey.com (http://www.flames-hockey.com) . Turns out there are quite a few now that the calgaryflames.com shut down their forum. I have a high powered server with my company that is highly highly unused. If you continue to have cost problem pm me and I'll see what I can do.

Sell add space, more google adds, etc. I've even seen some sites where they kinda slip adds automatically into the forum. its a little ugly on the eyes but it might be enought to pay for the cost of running the site.

php-5.0.4-10.5
mysql-4.1.16-1.FC4.1
and apache 2.0.54-10.3
Raid Drives
Intel Xeon™ Processor at 2.8GHz/2MB Cache, 800MHz FSB
8GB DDR2 400MHz (4X2GB), Dual Ranked DIMMs

[Bobblehead]

OK, for the first time in a while I'm getting the 'Server is busy' messages again.

Are we on the new server?

[KevanGuy]

Not yet, pho can talk about it better then I can but there has been major holds-ups on the colocation side. We physically have the server but it isnt hooked up yet.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

Any update on the server at all.

Love the site and have no problem giving a few bucks to help out. But getting the 'server is busy' on July 11th is a tad annoying..........just wondering what's going on with the new server.

[photon]

Sure!

The business wheels have apparently done their job and everything is a go. The only remaining hurdle is the physical installation of the environment that our server will ultimately go into. That starts this week so hopefully very soon after that (next week possibly?).

Sorry this has taken so long, but unforseen changes combined with a desire to wait for the better long term solution precipitated the long wait.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

Thanks for the update........much appreciated.

[Buff]

I can feel it getting faster already!

[photon]

I should be going tonight to put the server in the rack! Woo!

[Buff]

oooh!

See my previous comment and replace 'already' with 'again'.

[Hemi-Cuda]

I should be going tonight to put the server in the rack! Woo!

so it's a week later...are we on the new equipment now?

[photon]

Not yet, the rack apparently wasn't constructed properly so the rails didn't fit.

I don't know what it is I have the rack server curse; I have yet to do any kind of rack server work without something going wrong.

Anyway, it's in now and running, so now I just have to do a test copy of the environment over to make sure stuff works. Once I've done that, then it'll be ready to go and do the switch!

[photon]

Just another update.

Server is up and running in the rack, and it looks like everything has been set up. I'm doing a few more tests and a dry run export/import, and if that goes then we just have to set a cut over date.

Tentative date is next Tuesday as I'm away this weekend. :)

[Buff]

Yay!

So getting the new server up and running was much like Nilson's injury. Everybody wanted him/it for the playoffs, but realistically the only true answer was he/it would be ready sometime in 2006.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

Awesome news, photon.

Much appreciated!!!

[photon]

Ok.. had a bit of a set back with the colocation provider unfortunately and our home looks to be a month or two away.

This feels like the Neverending Story except there's no Luck Dragon.

teamchachi was looking for a temporary home for the server though so I'm hoping the move is still a go (will find out soon).

[FireFly]

The forums are running great now!

[Barnes]

CP homepage is still linked to the old forum URL.

[Shazam]

Did you guys make some more changes today? It's serving super-fast for me right now.

[photon]

Not that I'm aware of, it's been super fast for me pretty much since we got the new server running. Sometimes a page will load slow in IE but that's the Ad server servers being slow.