Glad I could help :)

Still slow. No change. Nothing has been done. Nothing is fixed. Still locking up.

Cool. eva2000 helped me some on my forums some time ago.

Geoff, in the last 30 minutes it became very bad.

If it helps at all, I was also enjoying a nice Stout and some pretzels during this time.

I think it was Kanye's fault..

Kanye doesn't care about our forum speed :(

rotfl

hey RandyC :)

checking Geoff's cronjobs, that 30mins your time coincided with the new backup cronjobs for dvdtalk database which makes sense, when these backups run to backup forum database due to size of the forums it will overload the server slowing things down.

more powerful cpus will help greatly in this matter

I recommend you look into Dual Athlon64 Opteron 250 cpus with 4-8GB of memory and fast 15k rpm scsi disks to replace the current database server :)

We're looking into updating the db server.

Until that point I can live with 30 mins of pain if the other 23 1/2 hours of the day run ok.

The stupid Video Game Annoucement Forum should be killed as well. Not many threads there so it probably won't affect performance, but no need for all those useless press release threads that rarely have any posts in them.

Well at least you didn't bag on my Book Talk forum :)

Actually that lame announcement forum is there to help us in our effort to build VideoGameTalk.com. It's something the studios wanted to see (a place for their announcements) so we added it.

Aww. I see.

Though it would make more sense to me to post the annoucements on a section of the vgtalk.com page rather than in an a sub-forum. I'd think you'd need to build up the content of the actual site more to impress the game studios moreso than build up the forum area. There's nothing there but reviews now.

I've noticed the past few days that, while the forum still seems to hesitate and freeze just as often, the episode appears to be over much sooner (only about 30 seconds as opposed to 2-3 minutes). Great work Geoff, thanks for your continuing efforts!

Yep, I got lots of slowdowns yesterday and freeze ups. They did seem shorter than in the past as Mike says.

Uh oh, seems like old times. Site grinding to a halt.

Sad to report.

VB helper came in, did some tuning, and then said we need new hardware. Not something easy to do... and so we're back to square 1.5

Apologies if this has been addressed in this thread, did a search for subscriptions within it and no results, but have thread email subscriptions been temporarily disabled in any fashion recently? I seem to not get them as accurately as before and am fairly certain it isn't a email issue on my end. They subscription icons no longer appear next to some threads I'm subscribed to at times also which lead me to inquire.

For now I disabled the subscription icons until we can finish getting everything running smoothly.

I hope to have them return soon

Just enabled a "full text search" keep your fingers crossed that this is does the trick.

I've been getting slowness again today, horrible patch there for about 10 minutes from 1:55 EST, super slow loading. At least 2 or 3 minutes for one thread to load.

And just had a reply hang for a few minutes before going through.

We're at yet another impass. I've done hours and hours of work optimizing things and now we're looking at what we might need to do in terms of adding more servers or upgrading existing ones.

Bizarre thing is that there's no defineably reason WHY the forum should slow the way it does and why the server goes bonkers.

Need money for new hardware, eh? Time to rollout those Premium Memberships. ;)

It might be backasswords or assbackwords but I'm going to take care of the forum issues & upgrades BEFORE we do premium memberships. Rather than fix things on the backs of those who want to pay, I want to be able to offer a good stable forum when it's time for people to open their wallets to get premium memberships...

Now that is something you don't hear everyday!

I think you would make a wonderful president! :) :lol:

But seriously, that is nice to hear Geoff.

Yep, that's awesome and makes perfect sense.

Many, myself included, probably wouldn't pay for a membership if the forum is plagued by slowdowns still. Have to make sure the product is worth people buying first. :thumbsup:

Yeah, but will there be pie and punch?

I just had a thought about a possible reason for the slow down that could be user related.

It seems the slowdowns began and worsened as tabbed browsers gained in popularity.

They have to cause some extra server hit. My browsing habits definitely changed, I go to the forum home page and open a tab for each forum with knew posts and then go through those tabs and open new tabs for threads I want to read. So many times I have 5-8 tabs loading at the same time. That's probably the same load as 5-8 different people loading a forum page at the same time.

Anyway, just a thought.

Upgraded the database server tonight w/ new Raid array. Cross your fingers and hope this helps :)

:(

It's not looking good.

Just added another web server to serve the forum web pages (forum.dvdtalk.com)

Slow for me right now.

Try loading the forum via:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com

Seems decent so far.

One thing...when doing a search, is there a reason that it takes up to 2 minutes to tell you that searching is disabled? Shouldn't that message appear immediately when attempting to search with the functionality disabled?

Not if the server is loaded to hell, it then would struggle to even give the error message.

Lots of problems just a bit ago (around 10 am EST). Reply hung, threads loading super slow, then got the forum down messages for a while.

if you get the forum down message, then Geoff is doing something..if it's just slow ..then it's the server having a fit..

My beef is that sometimes when you are answering a question in a thread, your post with the answer shows up before the post with the question. What's going on?

See this thread for example:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=440344

something funny is going on ..heh..I'm sure Geoff will look into it as soon as he gets a chance..

I think i figured it out. 2 servers doing web duty with 2 clocks not in sync. I sync'd them up so hopefully that will solve that problem.

After carefully observing the site for the last couple of days, I'm sorry to say that there hasn't been any improvement in the speed department. Still experiencing frequent long page loads, etc.