Rocketman - 2005-12-21 12:34 PM
HPC Factor has always been slow, in my experience, but lately it has been far worse. I have frequently attempted to reply to a topic, only to get a asp error page. Sometimes the post shows up, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it shows up, but 15 minutes later. This has caused me to "double post" a number of times. Is there a reason that things have gone from bad to worse? HPC Factor is an important resource to me and I want to keep it going strong. Is there anything that members of the community can do to assist in the running of the site? Do you need more bandwidth, a beefier server or just an expert in database optimization? What can we do to help?
Rocketman, the be all and end all solution is a new high spec server, but the owners don't have the funding avaialble at the moment to do this.
The reason why things are getting worse is because of the unoptimised forum kernel and the sheer traffic load this site receives. I also have my suspicions that there are a number of people around and about the place trying to DOS us... but that remains my cyncial speculation.
As has been outlined in the Forum Ideas / Bugs / Requests thread - and others - there is a three step plan:
New Internet Pipe - done; symmetric 8Mbps
New Server - a faster one is reportedly on the way, but I have no control over this and it'll still only be a tempoary measure and not sort the site out.
Optimised forum Kernel - I've been waiting since March.
Ideally IIS6 would be of use over IIS5 SP4, but that's small fry.
We do have MSSQL Server - SQL2005 would of course be nice though.
The site is all self supported, and I refuse to have banner ad's or popups on here so the site has never made a penny.
EDIT:
Quote
My personal server plan only hit £300.
Well the difference is Nick that your server doesn't actually do anything 99% of the time and has no RAM in it. If you want a server that actually lasts, you either have to down spec to real server hardware off of the second hand market, or spend the money.
Building a workstation from parts found on dabs.com wont actually hold true with the test of time.
