Plea to regulars from Martin

Former_MSE_Andrea

The site has taken a bit of a hammering this morning as the email went out yesterday and will this afternoon as Martin's on Radio 2 this lunchtime.

Can everyone try to keep searches down to a minimum, not use big graphics and stop snow-balling until after 5pm?

Thanks for your help everyone.

pennymakespounds

came in this route as i couldn't get 15 recent posts let alone 200 let alone the 500 i need to glance through as i've been out today.

i mentioned again the other day about one of my first postings about the dangers of businesses being too successful .. and whilst your member numbers, hits etc etc keep growing which are bound to make you all feel good... i've gotta keep saying that i'm increasingly fed up with this site as i just can't get on and use it like i need to .

Just what's the point of emailing tips to tens of thousands of people .. to then give them rubbish service in return ?????

You've got to get the techie side of the house in order...i really believe you should do everything NOT to promote the site for the weeks ? that it'll take to be able to provide the best level of service.

Out of 50+ sites of all types that i visit every day i have more problems with mse than the other 49 added together.
AND MSE IS GETTING WORSE EVERY DAY.

I've spent 30 years working with and trying to help companies who've gone out and deliberately shot themselves in the foot by trying to be too clever.
Seen this coming a mile off.

MSE_Martin

PMP

Im sorry you feel that way. Actually I can't agree though

First of all today is an exceptional day - when Im on radio 2 there are very little servers that can cope with the demand on the back end and the site has held out very well considering - it was never down for more than a minute and has not been too slow.

As for the performance yes i know the search isn't working - as I've said before we're in the process of changing the software - that doesn't happen overnight. Yet the site is working - you made the post - people are saving money - it is happening.

I understand your point about scale - but that isn't a problem here - the site has grown at a roughly consistent rate and each time the demand has been managed it will again.

The only thing that's not functioning is the recent posts and search buttons - all else is working fine.

As i say in a month i hope we'll have the new chat forum - until then do stick with it!

martin

loafer_2

First of all today is an exceptional day - when Im on radio 2 there are very little servers that can cope with the demand on the back end and the site has held out very well considering - it was never down for more than a minute and has not been too slow.

Matrin, it's about architecture rather than servers. You sound like you need a technical overhaul. I know you are already making some moves in the right direction however if you want a sounding board or advice on how to keep up with growth then feel free to drop me a line.

MSE_Martin

Absolutely and i know Will and Brendan are looking at this.

The next step is a software change of the chat forum which should make a big difference. It is really a question of reverse engineering from the original site and trying to do it without having to take the whole thing offline - but we're getting there.

The site has changed a lot in many ways over the past few months and next step is the architecture.

martin

loafer_2

Changing the forum software to you-know-what will help however there is another consideration. With active pages, generation is part of the picture, delivery is the other. The forums are literally wasting time and resources delivering via a congested, throttled connection.

A forum web server, and possibly also an image server all hosted on 100Mb connections in the US would help, as they can service and complete connections faster. Google cares more about whois records these days, panic not;). At the moment and especially during the day to day busy periods the servers are not taking advantage of users on faster connections.
If money is tight then all 3 could easily be the same box, but a decent one. $249/m can get you a cracking box these days co-lo’ed with 2000Gb/m on 100Mb.

You could keep the main site on the uk server and host the bandwidth hungry images from off site (even moving the 10 most popular would help, it's not that daunting).

On the main site running a CMS that saves pages static pages will reduce the server load however I doubt that is much of an issue actually. So something easy to manage would be better. Using either a DB or SSI to generate the Template/blah-blah of the site and will let you spend 101% concentration on the content. If you see the main site traffic increasing dramatically then an easy to replicate solution would be worth considering as adding additional hidden mirror servers or the main site would dead easy.
BTW: Do not mix CMS and portals, they can be chalk and cheese, in fact portals (***-nuke, slash Etc), are one form of CMS and probably not what you want.
Also in the google arms race, it would be worth changing your whois record to include "money saving" and page titles too, and getting the co.uk alias working properly wouldn't hurt either.

RedOnRed

With respect, it's not the greatest business acumen to advise your punters to refrane from using the service coz it can't cope.

Doesn't this forum partly serve as a platform to highlight all those second rate companies that do offer sub-standard service and can't cope?