Who's viewing a thread

I could swear that we used to be able to see near the bottom of a thread page who was viewing the thread at that moment, but I don't see that now. Was I imagining things, am I imagining things now, or is this really gone?

I don't see it anymore. Either we are both crazy or its gone.

I don't think you're crazy, because I don't see it anymore either...:eek3:

You can't view who's on line any more either. You can still see all their names on the main page, but you can't see what everyone is doing.

Rich has been playing with a few of the extraneous settings to see how it affects the server load.
A quote from him from another thread on the subject:

Yes. I'm changing some optional settings to see how that affects server load. Some of the larger sites I have gone to apparently disable these optionals for that very reason. So it's entirely possible that we might have to live without them here as well if throughput and server load becomes an issue.

I would think that deleting members profiles who have not been here in years, or deleting the avatars, private messages, classifieds and pictures of members who have been banned (that one I think should be done regardless especially the classifieds) and of course the already debated to death deleting of old classifieds would reduce the server load in a "cutting the fat" aspect versus the removal of some of our "treats".

Originally Posted by DAND

I would think that deleting members profiles who have not been here in years, or deleting the avatars, private messages, classifieds and pictures of members who have been banned (that one I think should be done regardless especially the classifieds) and of course the already debated to death deleting of old classifieds would reduce the server load in a "cutting the fat" aspect versus the removal of some of our "treats".

I can now wish people 'Happy Birthday' in a larger font, have not been able to do that for months. So whatever they are playing around with, has unforseen waves. Who knows what else might happen

Originally Posted by DAND

I would think that deleting members profiles who have not been here in years, or deleting the avatars, private messages, classifieds and pictures of members who have been banned (that one I think should be done regardless especially the classifieds) and of course the already debated to death deleting of old classifieds would reduce the server load in a "cutting the fat" aspect versus the removal of some of our "treats".

Sorry, but those do not affect server processing load at all. Server load is impacted by processes that the server has to do in order to construct a page before sending it to the browser that made the page request. Things such as calculating information to be displayed in the members' profiles being displayed in a thread, or information related to viewers of a thread, forum, or page is what can bring a server to it's knees with a lot of concurrent page requests. Searches, especially, are highly resource intensive operations on any server.

On the other hand, records simply stored in the database only affect the remaining storage capacity of the hard drive(s) in the server and don't affect anything at all related to loading and throughput if they are not directly involved in actual processor, MySQL processes, or I/O. If a requested page does not need a record in the database, then the records not being accessed do not affect the processing to generate that page.

So in a nutshell, when some people complain about slowness, I can either choose to ignore it, or I can try to figure out how to alleviate the problem. Which would you rather me do? If I look into it, SOMETHING has to give somewhere to try to streamline the processing done by the server. There are NO free lunches with this.

Quite simply, some functions that are process intensive just have to be disabled as overall traffic puts more and more load on the server. Being able to see who is actually viewing a thread or forum may be interesting, but if it helps reduce server load, I think we can live without it. Honestly, I really don't even want to think about another server move quite yet. So I will do what I can with what I have.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Quite simply, some functions that are process intensive just have to be disabled as overall traffic puts more and more load on the server. Being able to see who is actually viewing a thread or forum may be interesting, but if it helps reduce server load, I think we can live without it. Honestly, I really don't even want to think about another server move quite yet. So I will do what I can with what I have.

One site I use frequently found that putting a flood control on searches did a better job of dealing with their server load troubles than turning off the who is viewing a thread option. They kept the viewing thread option turned on (which kept all users happy) and implemented a 120 second delay between searches done by individual users (which ticked off only those folks that like to constantly run multiple searches (keywords, user, etc.) to hunt for info in various threads).. if that made any sense lol.