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234 community supporters, times $25 USD per account (assuming some users registered before the raise to $35) is $5850 USD. This is community supporters only, not counting ads and such (I assume the ads pay the bandwidth).
Why don't you use this money and upgrade the server to something lean and mean? Say... Dual Xeon, Gigs of RAM and SCSI disks. Certainly you can afford it. Just for the heck of it I configured a kick ass server at Dell with all the bells and whistles for about $3900 including VAT.
This will certainly speed things up.
__________________ The river sparkles and dances on the rocks.
At night, it flows deep and strong.
To forestall the inevitable backlash - Psionicist, please don't tell Morrus that he can "certainly afford" something unless you happen to be his accountant. I think a much, much better approach is to recommend how you would change the server if you were doing so, and let Morrus manage EN World. You're often a tremendous help technically, but this is the sort of thing that is best handled by email.
"You may give me a ride to work every day, and I never give you gas money, but this car goes too slow. You have enough money in your bank account; why don't you just blow it all on a sports car instead of budgeting and planning for things, or keeping a safety reserve? You should get one of those new BMW convertibles so that I can ride in it. You certainly can afford it."
Also note that some community supporters are given their titles for free as thanks for community work, that $10 or so of the $35 goes to rpgnow - that's why I still take Paypal from folks at the old $25 amount (actually $28, to cover fees) - and that much of the Community Supporter donations were spent buying the original server. Thus, your original estimation is significantly inflated.
I know you didn't mean to, but your message sounded more like a rude accusation than anything else. That approach isn't usually very helpful. If you'd like to discuss this with me by email, please feel free, and you're welcome to drool over new server configurations either here or in the Computer forum.
Note that we are upgrading to the new version of the BBS software fairly soon.
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Just trying to help. About 8 hours per day I cannot access EN World. When I can, the site is considerably slower than other web pages/forums the same size. EN World is larger than two years ago, and I can feel it.
vBulletin is a very nice forum software - responds quickly with few users, but it is really demanding when some hundred users tries to access it simultaneously. This is mostly because of database queries, sessions and such. I won’t go into technical details here, but a vBulletin board with 12000 members needs a very powerful computer for smooth operation.
I don't understand that graph, but I have not witnessed 8 hours downtime every day. What hours are you experiencing this? It must be while I'm asleep, although I haven't heard any other mention of this seemingly massive problem which I managed to overlook completely!
Check it out. Boards dropped again (again, 2 different locations, 2 different ISPs). I don't know if this is happening to anyone/everyone else, but just in case, I think it's worth mentioning. Could be that nobody realizes how shoddy the uptime can be, so maybe pointing out the down times will help. *shrug*
Well, the server itself is coping just fine. According to cyberstreet, we're exceeding our allotted bandwidth fairly regularly, which I imagine is the culprit. I'm talking to them about increasing it, but the monthly fees are getting ever more expensive.
Originally posted by Morrus Well, the server itself is coping just fine. According to cyberstreet, we're exceeding our allotted bandwidth fairly regularly, which I imagine is the culprit.
I figured that was the case. It's a rare event that I can't ping the server, but fairly often (on average once a day), that the site can't be reached.
Can anyone say Hivemind?
__________________ No, I am not Sean K. Reynolds.
Last edited by kreynolds; 5th August 2003 at 05:33 PM..
Morrus: I have a couple of ideas how you can get unlimited bandwidth for your website for virtually nothing at all, if you are willing to physically move the server to another server park.
Before I e-mail you details (if you are interested at all), can you tell if the server is placed in US or UK?
__________________ The river sparkles and dances on the rocks.
At night, it flows deep and strong.
Last edited by Psionicist; 5th August 2003 at 07:24 PM..
Originally posted by Psionicist Morrus: I have a couple of ideas how you can get unlimited bandwidth for your website for virtually nothing at all, if you are willing to physically move the server to another server park.
Before I e-mail you details (if you are interested at all), can you tell if the server is placed in US or UK?
It's in the US in Florida. Cyberstreet are the same people who host Mortality.net (it was Adlon who set me up with them).
Unlimited bandwidth for almost nothing? That sounds almost too good to be true.
Originally posted by Dinkeldog Anything with a lot of graphics.
Right. There is always that. Big fat sig images and such. How heavy of a hit does the site take due to the art galleries? I don't know how often they're frequented.
Without getting annoyed about the Hivemind thing (because I saw the smiley, and because I think everyone knows by now it's not us), I'd like to point out that most of the Hivemind now posts on randomlingshouse...so it's definitely not us.
Originally posted by AGGEMAM Sig pic's (especially animated) and the art galleries is the main offenders.
Yeah, some of the sigs around here are especially huge, and there's been a recent surge in animated comicbook characters in sigs, rather big ones too. I worked real hard to get my sig down really small in file size (about 10K).
I honestly think that a signature image dimension/file size limitation needs to be put in place, something that can be put in the boards FAQ.
Originally posted by AGGEMAM
Actually, the problem started to be severe just after the gallery "Gencon Babes" was put up, and have anyone seen to hit count on those, amazing.
I think we have a winner here. This has got to be the explanation.
Not that I have any problem with the GenCon galleries. Unless it gets to be an even greater probem, probably best to just let it die down. Once most folks have seen the galleries once or twice the traffic should decrease a good bit.
Of course, I know nothing about bandwidth and such, but this makes a lot of sense, and the timing seems just right.
Last edited by JoeBlank; 6th August 2003 at 07:01 PM..
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