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    Few maintenance changes

    Been talking with the hosting company after letting the new version bed in on the new server and there are a few minor config tweaks that are going to be made. Most of them shouldn't affect the user experience but the idea is to reduce the load on the server - basically the database side of things is getting constantly hammered so we are looking at reducing the load.

    The main one that might make a difference is that I've extended the time that search results are cached from 1 to 2 minutes. This may make the Most Recent Activity and Todays Posts pages slightly less up to date. You shouldn't notice it (after all, I've only made it 2 minutes) but we'll see.

    We're also looking at swapping the search engine out. At the moment the database indexes its own search results, in addition to all the usual retrieval of posts, topics and all that. By offloading the search this should take some of the heavy load away from the database. Not sure when this will happen.

    To give you some idea of how much traffic we generate, on average for the past month we have ~150 active (logged-in) users making ~450 posts a day. And there are a lot of non-registered lurkers as well building up ~2Gb of traffic every 24 hours.

    Finally there might be a little downtime for me to apply a security patch.

    #2
    Patch installed.

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      #3
      Excellent work Snake God. Exactly what I would have done.

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        #4
        You're such a noob, Sits. Have you never used the internet before? Whenever any changes are ever made to any website, it is much, much worse than it used to be. So, therefore, whatever Snake did is obviously terrible and utterly disastrous.

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          #5
          It's fucking awful, everything is taking forever to load on my phone, it looked much better before, why can't we go back to the Kumena board of all the whitest white and the pop up fake tesco ads....

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            #6
            The board doesn't need a search engine, we've got GO

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              #7
              That's a decent bit of traffic on Snake's stats above. Seems to be a wee bit more than we had prior to the disaster upgrade of 2016?

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                #8
                What was this disaster you speak of?

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                  #9
                  We got an upgrade in 2016 from a perfectly serviceable Otf to some madness that kept trying to break my phone with fake ads. And times new Roman font, loading times from 1995, and loads of white white white space. See the current wsc site to get an idea of how it looked. Snake saved us from Kunena hell.
                  Last edited by Lang Spoon; 11-10-2019, 21:42.

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                    #10
                    The strange thing is that in beta testing I actually liked that iteration of the board. When it went live, however, it became an absolute nightmare.

                    Snake has, however, put in the hard yards for us (thanks again, Snake) and got us to this stable, user friendly version.

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                      #11
                      The keen-eyed will have noticed that the footer keeps getting larger - tonights new entry is the Clear System Cache Cron Add-On. Basically, vBulletin caches a fair bit in a database table, which was getting very large and never really got emptied. What happens now is the cache is emptied once an hour. Users shouldn't see any difference apart from maybe a slightly slow response every so often. The benefit is that the server hard disk isn't getting so rapidly filled up.

                      There are some other changes on the way. The first is that we're going to switch the search indexing engine from the built in vBulletin to another one - Sphinx. This should take some of the load off the database and should be invisible to users. Not sure of exactly when this will be as I'm in Ireland for the next few days and we're not sure whether to do it when I'm not here to look after things. Depends on the urgency (ultimately, all I would be doing is going "Ah, it's buggered, better untick that box then....").

                      The other major change is to offload some of the work to Cloudflare, who do strange magical stuff like caching and load balancing of traffic to websites. Again, this should be invisible to users.

                      Neither of these changes will be done without announcing beforehand.

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                        #12
                        I have no idea what you're talking about Snake, but I'm very thankful that you do.

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                          #13
                          I fake it well.

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                            #14
                            Well, we're all very grateful to you for the considerable effort that you put into keeping the board up and running and in such fine fettle.

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                              #15
                              Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by johnr View Post
                                I have no idea what you're talking about Snake, but I'm very thankful that you do.
                                This. I genuinely have no clue.

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                                  #17
                                  John R speaks for me on this one

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                                    #18
                                    Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                                    I fake it well.
                                    Madame Onassis got nothing on you.

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