Front page wonky

resistor said:
I really liked having the recent posts on the front page. :(

It was undoubtedly my #1 most used site feature.


It makes the site less new user friendly, that was an easy way to get integrated into the various discussion. I have noticed no perfomance difference without it... :(
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Wystan said:
It makes the site less new user friendly, that was an easy way to get integrated into the various discussion. I have noticed no perfomance difference without it... :(
That's certainly how I got integrated into discussions when I was a new user.
 

Same here, without it I would have maybe 1/100th of the posts I currently do... :(

The irony is that without it, no-one knows this thread is even here... :(:(:(
 

Well, I've certainly noticed a large speed increase, and page views has jumped by over 50%, so people are able to view more pages more quickly.

From a server load POV, it has made quite a difference.
 


Pages views would increase though, because people are having to navigate into the forums to see recently updated threads, whereas before they could see it all from the front page. More people are having to navigate through more pages to get to what they want to see. That's not progress.

Plus, more page views results in more load on the web server. The place you might be seeing a gain is in the number of queries performed on the database server. If they have gone down, then this is a speed improvement. But increased page views is the opposite of what you want.
 


resistor said:
Plus, more page views results in more load on the web server. The place you might be seeing a gain is in the number of queries performed on the database server. If they have gone down, then this is a speed improvement. But increased page views is the opposite of what you want.

As I said, the result has been a significant decrease in load on the server.
 


Bring back the recent topics box. From a user POV it is a very bad thing to remove useful things. That was the feature I was using the most on the main page. IMHO, the poll box is pretty useless (okay i know the recent topics box is more important on the load).

Remove the feature by default, but make is possible to add it back in the options menu. Most people will leave it removed anyways.

At least, make it possible for paid users to use it.

I'm a unix sysadmin of a very busy server farms. I don't know anything about your servers setup but I'm sure you could optimize a lot of other things that can make a huge difference in performance. I guess I could also be completely offtrack and all this stuff could be completely useless for you.

-Stop all those useless services and daemons to free the ram and cpus
-optimize those hard disks parameters
-load the strict minimum of modules into your kernel
-analyse the sql requests and see what are the most frequent and long requests. See if you can optimize them, or add indexes. Things that don't change often like the recent reviews box, generate the content in a static file and just include it in the main page. when there's a new reviews added, just regenerate the file. (that's where you have to look up the most)
-Tweak with those filesystems options to make it faster.
-Depending of what you use as your database server and of your setup, you may be able to spit on different disks the busiest tables (faster disk reading since it's split on more disks, you can use symlinks with if you use mysql))
-tweak with those databases parameters to make it faster (cache and buffer size)
-add more RAM if you can't free enough in the previous steps,
-check your server swap performance
-check those cron jobs and make sure the big jobs are run on the less busy time.
-'vmstat', 'top' and etc. are your friends

You also could have done all this, if yes, then you might have too small servers for the kind of services you are giving. But I'd bet that some optimization could be done.

If you really want to decrease the load , you could unplug the network cables too. :)

just my 2 cents
 

Pets & Sidekicks

Remove ads

Top