Delphy
18th Jun 2007, 03:02 PM
Hi All,
You might have noticed a few things about the site of late, particularly the fact that up till a day or so ago it was very very slow. :) (I mean for general browsing, not downloading...)
To fix the problem, there was some unexpected downtime this weekend, wherein I did the following things:
1. Disabled the ads on the site, temporarily. The ad server needs optimising and tweaking, and removing ads is a way of making the site quicker. Becuase, however, we depend on partial ad revenue may I invite people to check our Donate page at the top left of the navbar (Support / Donate / Store (http://www.modthesims2.com/donate.php)) - we have 2 amazon stores (one US and one UK, and a cafepress store too). :)
2. The second thing I attempted was to compress the templates but this did not go as planned, and made the site slower still.
3. Lastly, I changed the way that the thanks are displayed specifically on articles. If we take the DFFI (Downloading for Fracking Idiots) article, it had 5738 thanks, and due to the way the Thanks system is embedded into vBulletin, it has to read every single one of those thanks just so it can display the "X people say thanks for this". I have thus disabled that functionality for articles except for the article creator, which in turn made a page load go from 30+ seconds down to less than a second. Quite an improvement, I think.
4. I've changed the Downloading help link that appears on every download page to point to the Wiki version of the DFFI article - this saves an extra click and is more intuitive.
5. I have cleared out everything from the My Downloads table that is older than 30 days - this still leaves 9 million or so records, but since the table was 33 million+ thats quite a saving. This does mean that Creator Scorecards can no longer go back further than 1 month, and the same with the My Downloads feature, but it's a compromise.
With all these changes as detailed above, I think you can now see a definite improvement into the actual speed of browsing pages, loading threads and so on. This increased speed will in turn let me concentrate on adding new features instead of trying to fix things. It's a vicious circle. :)
I hope you enjoy the site, and have a good time browsing our wonderful creators items.
Regards
Delphy
You might have noticed a few things about the site of late, particularly the fact that up till a day or so ago it was very very slow. :) (I mean for general browsing, not downloading...)
To fix the problem, there was some unexpected downtime this weekend, wherein I did the following things:
1. Disabled the ads on the site, temporarily. The ad server needs optimising and tweaking, and removing ads is a way of making the site quicker. Becuase, however, we depend on partial ad revenue may I invite people to check our Donate page at the top left of the navbar (Support / Donate / Store (http://www.modthesims2.com/donate.php)) - we have 2 amazon stores (one US and one UK, and a cafepress store too). :)
2. The second thing I attempted was to compress the templates but this did not go as planned, and made the site slower still.
3. Lastly, I changed the way that the thanks are displayed specifically on articles. If we take the DFFI (Downloading for Fracking Idiots) article, it had 5738 thanks, and due to the way the Thanks system is embedded into vBulletin, it has to read every single one of those thanks just so it can display the "X people say thanks for this". I have thus disabled that functionality for articles except for the article creator, which in turn made a page load go from 30+ seconds down to less than a second. Quite an improvement, I think.
4. I've changed the Downloading help link that appears on every download page to point to the Wiki version of the DFFI article - this saves an extra click and is more intuitive.
5. I have cleared out everything from the My Downloads table that is older than 30 days - this still leaves 9 million or so records, but since the table was 33 million+ thats quite a saving. This does mean that Creator Scorecards can no longer go back further than 1 month, and the same with the My Downloads feature, but it's a compromise.
With all these changes as detailed above, I think you can now see a definite improvement into the actual speed of browsing pages, loading threads and so on. This increased speed will in turn let me concentrate on adding new features instead of trying to fix things. It's a vicious circle. :)
I hope you enjoy the site, and have a good time browsing our wonderful creators items.
Regards
Delphy