[Hal @ Honda Direct Line]

Lamont is headed to Daytona so he asked me to post this e-mail that he received. We are trying to determine why the message boards seem to get real slow at certain times. Does this message sound reasonable and what should we do?

________________________________________________________

I have been working with the datacenter for some time on this. I was unable to find anything wrong with the server, and the datacenter wasn’t able to either (they did a 24 hour monitor). They mentioned that your server had a significant amount of traffic, so I did some investigating. It looks like you are pumping out just under 200 gigs a month (that’s a lot of traffic), which appears to make apache fail.

The load on your server right now is 1.62 (anything over 1 is something to worry about). You have several options, such as getting a larger server, or splitting your sites among multiple. I wish I had a better solution for you, and am not trying to upsell you, as I no longer offer new servers. Your biggest site appears to be vtxoa.com, with bigbikeriders and gl1800riders following closely. I’d recommend getting a new server, and putting two of those sites on it.

 

[TxGoldWing]

Server

200 gigs is a LOT of data.

Perhaps u might try turning off the profile pics that get displayed with each message posted. And gets dispayed by each person that looks at each message thread.

we can always look at the profile pic separately..

Just a thought.

 

[Guest]

limit Bulldog to 50 posts per day

:drive1:

 

[Tony in AZ]

limit Bulldog to 50 posts per day

============ now that is funny!

 

[WarBirdBob]

It is the gigabite law.
You exceed it and you go slow!!!!!
Just like I-4 here in Florida too many cars and it boggs down.
The only way out. Is to have less cars or more roads.
So get a bigger road or move some of the traffic to other roads.
It is a basic law of the flow.
TR

 

[Hedo]

Re: Server

200 gigs is a LOT of data.

Perhaps u might try turning off the profile pics that get displayed with each message posted. And gets dispayed by each person that looks at each message thread.

we can always look at the profile pic separately..

Just a thought.

JMO - Personally, I enjoy seeing the profile photos on each post. If it would speed-up the board, I would't mind losing the temperature bar though. I just removed mine......did it help ???

 

[Mike L]

Graphics eat up a lot of memory etc. I would think if everyone removed the animated avators and temp bars that would free up more space, I think they are always running on the server ? And not save all posts on the board, like only keep the last 3 months in storage. Avatar pics would be ok but maybe keeping all the moveable and animated down I think wouldbe a biggy. And limit the amount of pics in the photo albums also.

 

[*]

..

 

[Ridge Runner]

I've removed My time and temp bar. Hope this helps.

 

[Hal @ Honda Direct Line]

The e-mail that Lamont got is all we know. He has been unable to get him on the phone.

 

[*]

..

 

[storm]

Just to be different - I run all my PhP message boards ( 5 ) on windows2000 server - At work I am just running Oracle / Lawson upgrade (Unix Server) to a portal server - they recommend not going Apache but rather win2000.
We run 458 gig per day on through our 9 main servers but still manage to keep cpu usage to under 27%.
I also run 52 domains using host headers on just one server.
I've tried Linux / Unix but still had better luck with MS. Of course I am more qualified in that area - This is just my slate on things.

 

[storm]

OK another slate on things HAL - I was having problems with slow reponds similar to what you have going now - It turned out to be lost packets, My ISP was having all kinds of DNS issues so it wasn't that the access or server was slow but rather the packet loss was at 40% - Pages loaded very slowly or timed out even though I was running a 768k connection. I switched to another ISP and all problems promptly dissappeared.

Are you sure it is the server that is slow or is it DNS?

 

[Hal @ Honda Direct Line]

I am not sure of too much right now. All I know is that we need to find a real pro to solve this problem.

 

[mablacksv]

My guess would be that Avatars are NOT necessarly the problem. In almost all cases, every new image you see on a web page is stored in your Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive by your web browser. For each user, the server only has to download an image once. Once you see an image, you do not download it again from a server, instead your browser picks it up from your Temporary Internet Files folder. Images that are used over and over, such as Avatars are not big problem for the server.

Now take a look at http://www.vtxoa.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6818
This page contains many large images. Notice how long it takes to load the first time around.
This page and lots like it are linked off of http://www.vtxoa.com/vtxchopper.htm which you get to by clicking the VTOX Chopper Project picture at the very top of the www.vtxoa.com website.

I suspect that you are directing traffic to pages with lots of big images, that generally get viewed only once per user. This will cause a lot of bandwidth to be used.

A good hosting center should be able to give you detailed statistics about which web pages and images are using up the most bandwidth. You then can make a informed decision about what to do about it, either reduce usage or increase bandwidth (add servers/line capacity).

John

 

[markj]

You can run all the web pages from one server, might want to look at the LAN, bottlenecks at the switch level etc. What gear connects you to the internet circuit? Do you use any load balancing?

We use IIS and Netscape server for our pages and they work fine.

Might want to have someone look at the server set up as well as the RAM, are the NICs 10baset or 100? Lots of things to consider.