100-Page Thread Cap

[Blobmania]

Due to increased strain on the servers, all regiment threads will be capped at 100 pages, at which point they will be locked by the moderation staff. Please feel free to make a new thread if your own has been locked for this reason. If anyone needs the content of their Original Post made available for a new thread, please contact a moderator and we'll provide the BB code version for you.

Thank you for your co-operation,

Blobmania,
Senior Moderator

The change was done for performance reasons.

I can assure you the box the webserver is running on is one of the fastest in the market, however a many page topic, is straining it at lot, let me explain why.


Whenever a person opens a topic, the database is asked to locate all posts in the posts table (millions) that are with topicID x.
After It fetched these details and stored in memory, you can imagine if you have 100+ pages, think about 500 pages, then there are thousands of posts fetched and stored in memory.
When it has gathered this information it is going to filter this data according to what page you are watching... then send this information to your computer.

The sad truth is that whenever you open a big page topic, reply to it, whatever, every page load is bumping the MySQL database process to 100% CPU for a good second.. mind you that is on a latest Intel Xenon CPU..

Topics with 100 pages, are in my opinion a good limit, they take significantly less CPU load..

Except CPU, the memory usage will be less and overall the site will perform faster..


The problems with remaking your topic were unintended, please send a message to a moderator or me to send you your topic start post contents.


I understand not everyone loves this change, but believe me, it is for the better to keep everything running smooth.

We are running BCOF test, NW Servers, BCOF development stuff and the Forums on the same machine.
We can not afford to have constant spikes, which you will not notice when visiting the forums,because they are just that, very short spikes, but we do notice when testing BCOF.

Capping the pages to 100 prevents most of these CPU spikes. Unless you donate us 1440 euro each year, so we can host the forums on a separate server, it will stay as it is. We do not have the money to pay for it on our own.

[sirkaide]

Good bye good bye.

[Griffian]

Can I just ask why the server boxes seem to be so (To put it frankly) shit? There are plenty of other forums that could easily handle over one hundred pages per topic on thousands of topics?

[Blobmania]

I don't know the exact specs of the machines we're running on, but the majority of FSE's funding is going into BCoF. If you'd rather they diverted funds from their next game to keep the community happy arguing, then feel free to make a thread and state your case.

Or you could pay for your own community forum.

[William]

This probably would have saved a lot of drama if this had been enacted earlier.

[Locust]

Pages=Text
Since when does text lag?

[Griffian]

I don't know the exact specs of the machines we're running on, but the majority of FSE's funding is going into BCoF. If you'd rather they diverted funds from their next game to keep the community happy arguing, then feel free to make a thread and state your case.

Or you could pay for your own community forum.

Ok then, that does make sense. My other 2 questions are though, why limit at 100 pages as a regiment will just keep creating lots of 100 paged topics which will surely create the same effect? And secondly, why not just delete the old dead regiment's threads buried deep in FSE?

[DarkKnight]

Gotta love power trips

[Blobmania]

The issue lies with the thread being loaded. The larger a thread gets, the more needs loading every time someone opens it, and therefore the more server resources need using. It's not an overall space issue, it's with the sizes of the threads getting loaded every time someone decides to open it.

[Griffian]

The issue lies with the thread being loaded. The larger a thread gets, the more needs loading every time someone opens it, and therefore the more server resources need using. It's not with an overall space issue, it's with the sizes of the threads getting loaded every time someone decides to open it.

Can't a little bit of re-coding get round this? It seems a little prehistoric to demand the whole thread to the client when the client just wants to read page 213 for example?

[Earth Bby]

:^)

[Blobmania]

Again, probably, but neither I nor the Devs have the time to put into it. The pages themselves aren't being deleted, so the regiments can still look back through their history if they want to - it just allows us to keep the forums running smoothly without having to start digging around in SMF source code.

[Blobmania]

*And, for the record, it wouldn't be a little bit of re-coding.

[Griffian]

*And, for the record, it wouldn't be a little bit of re-coding.

Yeah I know, just an idea. If this is the only solution, so be it but you had to expect a little irritation or this wouldn't be the FSE community we have all grown to love and hate.

[Blobmania]

Yeah, I appreciate the thought. It's a shame this is how it has to be, but it's just the best way for us to keep the forums running at the moment.