An update on recent technical problems and more from the admin: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/250292/on-technical-difficulties-mod-coverage-and-other-things/p1?new=1
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speed problems (once again)
Ramius
Joined: July 19, 2000Administrator, ClubPA admin
Joined: July 19, 2000Administrator, ClubPA admin
Just figured I'd preempt the inevitable thread.
We're having some speed problems related to network connectivity between the webserver and the database server. HomeLAN has been notified and we just need to wait for it to be resolved. In the mean time, pageload times of between 6 and 40 seconds seems to be typical.
We're having some speed problems related to network connectivity between the webserver and the database server. HomeLAN has been notified and we just need to wait for it to be resolved. In the mean time, pageload times of between 6 and 40 seconds seems to be typical.
Ramius on
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Gifthorse + mouth and all that, but I'm suprised the people that are paying them for hosting havn't complained about this stuff
For their services homelan charges PA absolutely nothing. Not a dime. So it's hard to beat the price.
The current system is comprised of 4-6 high-end webservers and an ultra-powerful databae server. The database server processes an average of 200+ queries per second and probably upwards of 400 per second at peak usage.
The webservers transfer somewhere on the order of 3.5-5.0 terabytes of data per month, just for Penny-Arcade, plus they are shared by other homelan hosted sites. All of the penny-arcade pages are dynamically generated through the php scripting engine.
A Ford Omni, this is not.
EDIT: oops. This is Ramius, BTW. I had received a PM to this account so I logged in to check it, and then promptly forgot who I was logged in as.
i wouldn't mind chipping in every now and then so they can buy more stuff to speed us up :?
I understand PA is immensely popular and so are the boards, but 5TB seems an awful lot.
So I'm sure if someone had the time to really streamline things, we'd be better off.
While it would never be implemented, I'm not opposed to the forums going on a seperate server, forcing you to register before viewing, offering a two week trial, then forcing you to pay $10 a year for use of the forums. $10 isn't a whole lot, and only once a year, that's nothing. With the number of active members who I am sure would be willing to pay less than a dollar a month for the forums, it would pull in enough revenue to cover the forum's traffic, and perhaps even cover any additional costs that Gabe and Tycho might have to deal with for the main site.
But of course this would never happen since I'm sure a lot of people think the forums shoiuld be free, but if anything, the $10 a year would get rid of people who come in just to goatse the place. Then you wouldn't have to IP ban and shit. Just close their account and don't refund them the remainder of the $10 for the year.
I'm sure something like this would more than work, but it will never be implemented.
And wayne, I am doing work at optimizing right now. This is one of the projects that never got attention when my time went heavily into the forums. I'm gonna make a thread right now for some people to hopefully help me test a slimmed-down newspage.
You can afford an internet connection, but an extra 95 cents a month(or whatever it averages to) is too much?
Technically it would only be $5 a year for CT because he's british.
For me, it's the elitism.
I used to donate more than that to clubPA so it wouldn't bother me.
But a lot of people here don't have a credit card.
Also the forum would be far smaler if it was pay, something I don't think would be an improvement.
Perhaps the trick is to just put up a half dozen banner and tower ads built into the forums. Regular accounts can see the ads. $10 a year paid accounts don't see the ads. Hell...I'd pay $10 a year so I didn't have to see that stupid google ad.
Maybe instead of a completely private forum, just have the ads serve as a way to motivate payment. It's probably more realistic that way as it is.
Either way, I doubt either option will happen, but to offer us an ad free forum for $10 a year...I'd take you guys up on that. Even with just hte one google ad right now. If there was a way to quickly program accounts to not pull up that ad and to just pretend it's not there, it may be a way for some of us who can afford $10 a year to help support the hosting of the forums better than we would with ads we will never click on anyhow.
SA has pay forums. The reason it works is because they have a large porn section, something I don't think we'll do here.
So essentially the forum would die.
I don't think it would die. But it would be less active that CoT.
For one, there is management costs - for instance under clubPA, there was time spent preparing the monthly "gift", managing the email list of people who get the gift, fielding questions about donations, about the gift, and about ClubPA. The time spent for adding people who wanted access to the ClubPA forum.
There is also the issue of, when people pay for a service, they come to expect a higher level of service. While I agree that with proper funding and moving the forum off to its own host, we could probably increase stability, I don't want to deal with the politics of people with vested interest in the forum feeling they have more say in how it is run, or complaining when there are technical outages.
Some forums can thrive on community funding and community organizational structure. In fact, I know a fairly popular one just across the bridge, and its filled with people with similar interests to the PA forum crowd. But going to something like that here would be a fundamental restructuring of how we perceive and run the Penny-Arcade forums, and I don't see it happening any time soon.
BUT! I know some forums that have a special usergroup for people who donate money. They get a special title to make them feel like they are cool. While that may not be enough, if there was a way to link these usergroups to something in a script on the site that said "DO NOT DISPLAY THIS AD FOR THIS USERGROUP" it might be a way to motivate donations.
I think that would be less complicated than forcing everyone to pay. Overall though, I just feel like if I don't have to pay for the forums, why should I? As a visitor, I need a reason. Since it's only $10, getting rid of the one ad we have on the forums, or coming up with some other little perk is enough to get me to part with my $10 to help support the site.
But hey, that's just me. I could be the only guy who thinks like this.
however, i could care less about the ads. since i ignore them mostly anyway.
but if it is too much of a hassle (i think that is what they are getting at) to collect the money, then it probably isn't worth the extra bang.
But yeah, just trying to keep up with paying for a better server, donations or not, even for just the forums could very well be too much hassle. I wouldn't know. I obviously don't run a website this popular...
...yet