[Mitch]

This is to let you know that the template will be this ugly blue for the next couple of days. The forum has been tearing apart Media Temple's grid server for months now and I've been too busy to deal with it. I finally have some time and will be attempting to trace it through out the week.

[macman104]

Awww....good luck fixing it, because you're right, it is ugly 

[Mitch]

The site has been $70 or more over every month!

[Mitch]

Ok, i tried to clean up the theme a little bit (making it more white and less blue-on-gray), hopefully it is a little bit more tolerable.

[macman104]

The site has been $70 or more over every month!

Wow!  I can't even believe that.  Do the ads cover much of the cost, or do you end covering most of it yourself (if you even want to comment)?

[Mitch]

This month the site went over the amount ads payout.

[Borek]

Good to know forums were not nuked... My first idea was that something happened to the server.

[enahs]

There are a ton of things that can be done to trim the size of the pages, and thus, the amount of data traffic required and thus costs.

[Mitch]

We're good on the traffic side, we're not good on the processor side. I'm starting to think it's from the huge database we use. Maybe I should go optimize some tables.

[Mitch]

We had 600 pages of error messages, so I cleaned that out, I'll see if that helps. Reverted the forum to the portal for now.

[Mitch]

It might be time to move Chemical Forums over to a VPN, but I don't know how.

[david]

I made some changes to the amount of posts/messages that are displayed on each page. You should notice the pages loading faster. This will also cut down on the b/w and cpu for each page load.

[Mitch]

Thanks David, I'll keep an eye out to see if that helps.

[macman104]

Did this also include a change in the number of threads/page?  Some forums like gen chem see a lot of traffic, and already the new post topics are scrolling off the 1st page (and I've only been gone less than half-a-day).  It's not huge, but a little annoying to flip to the second page to see if there are other missed things.


EDIT:  I suppose in fairness, someone has posted something like 8 new threads, but usually it is a fast moving subforum that I think would be nice to see a few more threads per page.  Threads themselves are fine, as they move slower, but subforums, etc, I think would be nice to have more threads/page.

[Mitch]

It's a good suggestion. But it's more important to figure out what is causing processor over-runs at the moment. If its not the issue, we'll expand it out again.