So... slow...

[Gary W]

This website is absolutely slow.

For actual stats on the slowness of the site, check the Speed here: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=flashkit.com

Any thoughts on adding more servers/optimizing code/adding more RAM?

[jstarkey]

Originally posted by Gary W

Any thoughts on adding more servers/optimizing code/adding more RAM?

It's the ruthless spiders and the people who feel the every file we host needs to be on their hard drive.

We're constantly optimizing and blocking the abusers, we can't keep putting out $$ in new servers to cater to them.

[Gary W]

I understand; some solutions would be having more ads for non-premium members and when people pay then the ads are removed so that the server gets more money either way?

Some might scream at me, some might agree with me.

Those who truly use this community (and there are definitely more people out there that use it much more than I do, which I must admit, I'm barely a Flash user) would be willing to pay a few bucks a month to keep this site faster.

That's what I do at www.deviantart.com for instance and I'm happy just to support the place

[jstarkey]

That's been discussed quite a bit, but never makes it through the tape.

Last year, Byron and I were considering requiring membership in order to download files -- the links to downloads wouldn't even show up unless you were a member. It was declined by management. Their reasoning is they want FK to stay free for everyone, so it's a good thing for the vast majority of our visitors.

The things we have in place are doing a great job of preventing lag, most of the time. If it wasn't for them, we'd be back to the point of several minutes load time for every page 24x7 - if the page even loaded at all. FYI: We are paged when FK becomes unresponsive.

Alexa is only sampling the site. We can't judge response time on their samples. Roughly 80% of all pages take less than a second to parse on the server. But, when spiders get to the forums, any page that hits the DB (about 20% of FK) slows to the point that you're talking about.

IF you can send me an email the next time FK slows to a crawl, I'll take a look at the logs and see if there's a common that I can add to our checklist.

[Gary W]

okay thanks I will

[jstarkey]

Gary, thanks I rec'd your email.

How's it been since then? It was the weekend when you sent it and the logs were all zipped and etc. before I got to them. (Due to the holiday)

[Gary W]

Still quite slow now

[jstarkey]

Great timing

Looking into it now.

[aversion]

Not sure if it's at all relevant or not, but sometimes when I load the forum index page there is a big wait for an ad to download, sometimes up to a minute. Everything else seems to load normally but after the menu has loaded it sits and says it's waiting for 'eidoserve.com' something like that. Then it renders the rest of the page normally once the ad is up, though sometimes I've noticed there's no ad at all after a wait.