Potato needs an upgrade

[RoseOfHizaki 131]

I Havent been a member that long but even when i was lurking as a guest I noticed the site generally runs very slow. Over the days/weeks this has just gotten worse and worse and now im having trouble even turning pages on MH.

 

How is MH run? Is it run off someones low powered NAS or netbook? If it keeps server rental fees down to run it on slow server then fine, but there are enough members here that im sure are willing to chip in $3-5 each towards server costs.

 

I hate how slow the site runs and it genuinely gets on my nerves. 

 

before you say "it could be your internet" I have 76mb fibre connection and 20-30tabs open in chrome and another 10-20 in firefox and every site thats loaded up on those tabs run perfectly fine, Occasionally there might be a minor delay in response times but no where near as bad as MH

 

 

Will something be done about this or are we doomed to wait until the server MH is based on goes into critical and has a heartattack?

 

 

Im sure im not the only one suffering from the slow downs.

[Ito 2438]

I have noticed a general sluggishness to the site as well...so your observation has been noted. I will be talking to the other staff members about this as well and we will try to get to the bottom of it.

I really don't know why we would be experiencing this slowness. I don't know the nitty-gritty details of our hosting information (that would be up to Kai), but we run through Dreamhost, and we have been paying for pretty decent hosting for some time now...so I really have no idea.

If you look up top though in the global forum message center, you can see that there is a donate link, where you can send your money directly to pay for the hosting of this site. That means we can't take it from you and using it to buy hookers and blow...what a shame.

[Flame-X 441]

I think animated gifs on avatars and sigs should be banned. Those definitely put more stress on server loads. I go to other forum sites where animated gifs aren't allowed, and they load up fast.

[WhirlingBlack 1043]

Is there a way to lower the donation limit? I think a lot more people would be willing to contribute if the minimum donation weren't 10 dollars.

[RoseOfHizaki 131]

I think animated gifs on avatars and sigs should be banned. Those definitely put more stress on server loads. I go to other forum sites where animated gifs aren't allowed, and they load up fast.

 

This would be a good place to start - Most forums ban animated avatars & sigs so I dont see why the same rule shouldnt be applied here too if the site is running slow.

 

Of course the animated avatars and sigs look cool but then everyone else suffers from poor site loading times because you opted to have something flashy

[sai 868]

And I guess it would also help if people kept to the signature limit. If you go a little bit over it it's no big deal, but sometimes I see people with huge sigs and we have to take them down FOR them because they refuse to change them.

 

Also, do really that many people have gifs in their signatures/avatars? I can only recall a few.

 

And finally, I personally never had that many problems with slow loading times. There were days when the site would hardly load at all, but usually I can just access the website fine. If I have to wait a few seconds for a thread to load then so be it, I'm not THAT impatient.

[kai_desu 340]

We have a dedicated VPS server through Dreamhost with 1 GB of RAM - it runs me a little more than $50 a month to keep it up (just the server - there's other costs for the chat (which is not hosted by us) and forum software as well), and can easily add more resources - but I honestly don't have the money to do that on my own. When we started out, we were hosted through their shared server plan which was an absolute NIGHTMARE after the forum grew in size fairly quickly.

 

I've been looking to move things to a different host though, as I've just had a belly-full of DH the past couple of years (been with them since 2006ish). I've come to settle on eleven2, but not in a position to migrate things to a new server at this point.

 

I'll look into lowering the minimum donation amount, but I think that's pre-set by Dreamhost. If I can though I will! Anything helps.

 

EDIT: Unfortunately I'm unable to lower the minimum donation amount - it's set by Dreamhost, but I'm not sure why it HAS to be a minimum of $10.

[Champ213 1858]

This would be a good place to start - Most forums ban animated avatars & sigs so I dont see why the same rule shouldnt be applied here too if the site is running slow.

 

Of course the animated avatars and sigs look cool but then everyone else suffers from poor site loading times because you opted to have something flashy

 

 

Signature images aren't hosted on the server. People have to upload thier sig images to a filehoster of their choice and hotlink them. So they can't put any strain on our servers. They would only increase loading times insofar as the pics themselves might load slow. The forum as such would load normally, but some signatures images would be missing, if they are hosted on a slow filehost. But a slow-loading signature image from an external filehost wouldn't slow-down overall performance of the forum.

 

Avatar images are hosted locally. But users with an animated avatar aren't really that common, so it's doubtful that they are a cause of lag, or that banning them would increase speed.

 

 

Also, the slowdowns seem to be really random. In 95% of times, I personally get normal loading times. Only very rarely I experience loading times longer than 10 seconds. Other staff members have experience more common slowdowns. So... it's not easy to pin down probable causes.

[RoseOfHizaki 131]

Well thanks for letting me know, could it be random DDoS attacks? ;p maybe the server which the site is hosted on is shared with other sites and they are experiencing heavy traffic?

[kai_desu 340]

Nah it's definitely not a DDoS attack. If it were, the forum would be down completely until either our host or I blocked the culprit IPs.

 

I can't honestly say what it is at this point, could just be the connection Dreamhost has that's either slow or taxed during certain times of the day (like, moments of high traffic running through their servers). It doesn't matter what YOUR internet speed/connection is - especially if you say your connection is as fast as it is. You'll only be able to download/receive information from any server as fast as they can serve it to you within their allotted bandwidth (you have to remember they're serving thousands and thousands of connections at any given time).

 

Hope this clears your speculation up. We're aware of things and have done quite a bit to ensure the forum runs smoothly. We went through a period (I'll call it the dark ages) where the forum crashed every 15-20 minutes due to the amount of traffic we were getting before we moved to a cloud-based VPS server.