Site performance, Server errors, outages and tunings

[Like Ra]

Especially if we want a download function (and I do).

Download? To be honest, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. The rippers will kill the site.

Or upload? Do we need streaming? I've no experience with this stuff, so any help will be greatly appreciated.

[B1u3]

Hm, ok. But an upload with streaming would be helpful, yes.
But I've got no experience there also...

[Like Ra]

The streaming feature will have to wait. These are the plans:

o- The multiple upload feature works (yeeehhaaa!!!), what theoretically should lead to more uploads, hence we need more disk space. The disk space can be upgraded at no cost (see above somewhere). I kept the space for possible backups, but:

o- There is a backup service available. For (currently) $10 a month the filesystem can be daily backed up on a separate server and restored should a crash occur. I thought about backing up to my home computer, but restoring will take a lot of time (I'm on DSL). I will continue to backup the database to my home box, though.

o- I have to make another serious round of eliminating any dependency on photobucket and reupload hundreds of files to the blog. A very time consuming operation, but it must be done.

o- I stumbled upon an interesting forum plugin that enables pre-parsing and caching, what can decrease parsing time by 50%. Worth a try.

o- Thread tagging was a very interesting idea, but it's difficult to maintain tag consistency. There must be a feature to select predefined tags, what would require a completely new plugin.

o- Do you have any other ideas/suggestions?

[B1u3]

Uhm...maybe a media library. Its fore sure some form of the spirit of a forum itself, but it its not very helpful to have pictures, movies and the like scattered all over different posts. And when its linked and the link disappears with time its always frustrating to search for something and to find only a 404.
But I don't know if this is possible with the board without consultating stuff like picasa or flickr.

[Like Ra]

And when its linked and the link disappears with time its always frustrating to search for something and to find only a 404.

This is why I prefer when images are uploaded here instead of linked from somewhere.

maybe a media library. Its fore sure some form of the spirit of a forum itself, but it its not very helpful to have pictures, movies and the like scattered all over different posts.

There are gallery plugins, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea. We need to group images somehow, right?

o- One way to achieve that is tagging, for example boru-style (every image s given tags, all discussions are image-based).

o- Another way is to group them in thread, like it's done here.

o- And the third way is a usual gallery with sub-directories. But the discussions are separate: image based, and usual threads.

Looks like for the time being, the current version/method is easier to understand and maintain. But if there is another way to organize stuff, please let me know, but do not forget to mention the existing plugin 😉

[Like Ra]

o- I stumbled upon an interesting forum plugin that enables pre-parsing and caching, what can decrease parsing time by 50%. Worth a try.

This is done. Can't say I see a big improvement. Let's the preparser run for some time. I hope MySQL will survive the additional load.

[B1u3]

Ok, we will see...I've got to think 😊

[Like Ra]

Just discovered that most "static" posts with technique description have no images because Photobucket changed the links. I hate them... So, I aeady reuploaded more than a couple of hundreds images and tweaked dozens of old posts, still hundreds and hundreds to go. Plus I have to recreate all static posts now, because they do not make any sense with no photos...

OK, looks like I will be quite busy during the next 4-5 weeks... 😕

Yeah, I should have done it years ago. Also from the performance point of view. But now I have no choice. I wonder if Google will like the new structure.

[Like Ra]

I've made a significant progress in reuploading images and reformatting posts: from 12 pages ("photobucket" search results) down to 4!

[Like Ra]

Almost done! I'm sooooo effective ... 😁