• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Who's viewing a thread

TheFragginDragon

TheFragginDragon

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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?
 
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.
Click to expand...
 
Just a few ideas.......

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".
 
DAND said:
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".
Click to expand...

:iagree:
 
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 :D
 
DAND said:
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".
Click to expand...

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.
 
WebSlave said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Yeah, most decisions involve trying to figure out which option will piss off less people, but be the best decision if they are not mutually exclusive. :rolleyes:

Some of the options in the admin panel will tell you specifically that they are not recommended for large sites for the very reason I am having to address them right now.
 
(Ear splitting whine) "STOP taking away my toys!!" :rofl:
 

Attachments

  • temper tantrum.gif
    temper tantrum.gif
    3.8 KB · Views: 123
deborahbroadus said:
(Ear splitting whine) "STOP taking away my toys!!" :rofl:
Click to expand...

nice attachment Deborah, you just have that lying around? :rofl:

what about the mods viewing? would removing that as well help increase the speed? or are you leaving that for the "mods are still watching" factor?
 
Utta said:
nice attachment Deborah, you just have that lying around? :rofl:

what about the mods viewing? would removing that as well help increase the speed? or are you leaving that for the "mods are still watching" factor?
Click to expand...

If the algorithm for that routine references the mods via a usergroup code, it will not have much effect on throughput because of the small number of members in that group. But I still may remove it anyway, as every little bit can help, even if it only reduces the size of the file sent to a viewer's browser.
 
Oh, bear in mind that I may turn options on and off just to see what effect it has on overall throughput. If something has virtually NO effect, then I will leave it in place. But it may take several days of trial and error before I have a handle on this.
 
WebSlave said:
Oh, bear in mind that I may turn options on and off just to see what effect it has on overall throughput.
Click to expand...

Glad for the warning ahead of time. If Fauna reality all of a sudden starts changing (like that evening you played with the background color schemes) and we're not sure whether it is you, we might have to lay off the chocolate vodka for a little bit :rofl:
 
OK, the folks over on CornSnakes.com don't like this change neither... But I found that setting the member name to random rather than alphabetical uses less server resources. Maybe that will be an acceptable compromise...
 
WebSlave said:
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.
Click to expand...

And who says you're never too old to learn something new? Actually, my knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of how this all works is minimal and some of what you posted went right over my head, :duck01:but I do think I now have a better understanding of processing versus storage.

I was just throwing out suggestions trying to help but only succeeded in showing my ignorance of the subject. :dunce: But that isn't going to stop me from continuing to try to help. :D

Stay tuned for my next stupid suggestion. ;)
 
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