WP is unusable tonight!

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Better interface and navigation are all good but you still haven't dealt with the reason why the site is so slow in the first place.

Don't believe that message it is not correct, it isn't just down tot he number of requests. The server itself can handle a much bigger load it is what happens to the requests that is causing a backup of responses.

Call me tech stupid but I've been wondering if there was a way to get rid of that old junk. I mean that's a load and long ways back!

Isn't there ways to delete those threads?

Then again I guess it wouldn't be right. Maybe Alex is afraid he'll lose information that's vital......

What else could it be?

Wouldn't you like to know?

A fun project you could say, mainly because I few ideas I want to try and that would be an application.

Sure there is. Though it you just go deleting blindly out of the database you will royally f**k things up. You have to know what you are doing.

A very bad idea. This adds a large chunk of HTML to each page. It would slow things down.


I open one tab to the index, then right click each forum I'm interested in, to open them on separate tabs. I then close the index tab. In the forum tab, I then I right click each "new posts" icon I want from the topics. That gets me all the things I want to look at. I then click the "mark all threads read" in that forum tab, and immediately move on to the next forum tab. Once I've done all the forums, I have a mass of tabs open to the latest posts in various threads. I then move on through all those posts. Eventually, I go back and close all the forum tabs, which by then have done their marking of thread as read.

It's called "tabbed browsing".


The index IS a central one.

I do keep a whole bunch of bookmarks, to useful places. I don't bookmark the individual forums, but I do bookmark the "Discussion" link to the index, as it's fractionally quicker than scrolling to the top/bottom of the page. The forums are all there. I sometimes leave that open in a tab, anyway.


So why go back to the index? Why not just leave it open in a tab?

I have proposed things like that in the past, text only mode, archiving of old threads (I mean, why would anyone want to reply in a thread from 2004?), but so far no luck... Also there could be a purge of old/inactive users.

I dunno. There's been some pretty epic thread necros from time to time.

I've noticed this as well. Sometimes I can't even get the site to load. I'm experiencing this problem with Aspie Affection too.

I quit using that site because I can't get anything to load up. Here there are some forum posts I'm interested in, but if the speed issues aren't addressed I won't be here as much, and I might not even come back.

I think it might be worth having an effective archival system. Perhaps set up a separate place people can go where all the archived posts are kept, and another that only shows threads with updates in the past month? It might increase the space used, but not by very much. This way nothing has to be deleted, but people can access active discussions without having to wait five minutes on every page load/refresh.

It should get a lot of members like myself to stick around a bit more and become more active since there won't be as much hassle involved with posting.

I don't see anything here that should tear down the bandwidth unless the site is seeing a major bot attack. Cleaning things up a bit should make it run very smoothly.

well, only if you like seeing posts of people no longer visit the forum. The odd thing is very few notice the date.

All the more reason to archive them. It's quite annoying when someone digs up a thread from early 2007. Perhaps any threads that haven't been posted in for over 2-3months should be dumped into the archives? That would probably help quite a bit.

Just over 2 million posts. A bit over 1/2 million PMs. I doubt each occupies more than 1KiB. Say 3GiB bytes total. The whole of WP could be being held in RAM. Add some extra for index space, and so on, and it still isn't that large a database.

MySQL is a pretty reasonable database server. I'm sure it caches references quite adequately. Most of the information required to display pages is accessed via indexes, so there is no significant "lookup" time to get the post text.

About the only "active" effect of a user displaying a page is that the "view count" for that thread needs incrementing. Avoiding modifications to the database is of paramount importance - as they invalidate cached data - hence the choice to employ the clever algorithm: "On each view, randomly, 2/3rds of the time, do not update the view count, but 1/3rd of the time, update it by three". The count is therefore not "perfect", but will be quite close to the "correct" figure. The saving is that the thread record is updated three times less frequently, hence the cached copy stays OK.

Anyway... I cannot see any reason to expect removing old threads/posts to improve the speed of WP by any significant amount. They are not referenced, therefore don't get into the cache, therefore have little impact on the database server's performance.

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As a curious thought.... reducing the number of threads displayed per page in each forum's index, and/or dropping the number of posts displayed per page within a thread would have a very large impact on performance. E.g. dropping the posts per page from 15 to 7 might double the performance. (Well... not double, but at least improve it by quite a percentage.) Bear in mind that a lot of us look at a thread's new posts, which quite often will be just one post. On average, to see that one post, we will look at a page with seven other posts on it, all of which we've already seen.

Wow it really weeds out the trolls and NT's. I thought it was a diliberate ploy.

@gary: lol

@lau: how about egosearch?

I'm going to eat lunch and then make my usual number of worhless posts and observations on life and then I'll let somebody else have a turn. Lets just look at it all like taking turns in a small lifeboat and hope that it's our turn to be in the boat when the sharks come around.

Planet of the Weary topic

Sometimes when I want to exit a forum or thread the site "assumes" I want to reply and switches to the screen that states WP is experiencing a high volume of messaging and cannot handle the load and invites me to watch a 50 minute video of Alex promoting WP. I have seen this video a few times and would like there to be a choice, if I have to wait, as many have seen this one. And the screen always states that WP will be back in 2 to 3 minutes or less, and this does not happen.

My computer is slow anyways and I personally have not experienced a slowness that others have.