FK server speed becoming less acceptable

[LDpro]

Hi, I'm writing on behalf of a bunch of people who feel that the load time of FK is simply painfully slow. Short of buying new servers, I would suggest that FK moderators require at least one or more of the following things (most of you will think that these are evil suggestions, but realize that I propose them out of server practicality):

* Kill Flash footers. If not that, at least cut them in half.

* Don't let people post large photographs.

* Convert PHP to ASP. (People differ on this, however I believe it is much less bandwidth intensive).

* Upon the release of Flash 6.0, get rid of all Flash 4.0 tutorials and posts related to that. (This is a "long-term" plan, I suppose

* Require that all posts that are over 60 days old be deleted, unless members have them bookmarked in their myFK settings. <--- This especially applies to coffee lounge messages which, on the whole are useless compared to alternate sections of the site that provide more utility.

* Eliminate the use of icons




I grant that these are all things that make FK pretty special, but the simple fact is that the site simply loads horribly slow. I'm on a t1 that doesn't have much traffic on it, either. Until Internet.com buys more servers for FK, I strongly suggest that at least some of the changes above occur.

LDpro

[banglafreak]

kill the footers after everyone spent so many hours trying to optimize them?
large photographs dont affect the entire site's speed
i dont know much about either
sounds semi-reasonable. there'd have to be a poll that finds out if a large number of people still use 4
which would kill all the great content flashkit boards have to offer
0.5k a piece doesnt bother me. each page's source code weighs at about 65k so icons dont hurt too much

so the solution? thats for mark f to decide

just my opinion
~jason

[karnak]

personally, until the server issues are fully straightened out, I would happily support a temporary ban (yes, a ban) of all footers if I knew that it would cut a substantial amount of corners.. if we are talking about "every byte counts", then it only makes sense that a thread with five 15K footers (that don't really need to be there) are taken out of the picture, however temporarily...

Hope more people will agree with me on that. I'm certainly not against footers, I just would like everyone to think of it as if we were contributing to a "fund to help save flashkit"

Mark- what do you think about a temporary ban on footers? Would that help at all? Or would it be just too much trouble..? :P


..good luck as always.

[dolface]

i'm not sure that there is a solution, short of throwing more hardware at the problem.
is there someone at internet.com we could write to? 100,000+ emails pleading for more servers might have some effect, especially since all of us are--at the very least--eyeballs for advertisements.
i am unable to use flashkit during the day, which is a major drag, since that is when i work--usually. i've found that the only way to get access is to log on after about 7:00 pm PST, which sucks, because that cuts into my personal time.
at this point, i'd agree to pretty much ANYTHING to get speeds back up again, and i'm sure that there are many others who use and contribute to fk on a regular basis who feel the same way.
anyway, that's my $.02

-g

[Flashkit]

Unfortunately none of those things will help the situation.

The slowness is caused by too many concurrent connections (ie httpd processes) it is not a bandwidth issue. A web server can only handle so many. We are working on a new architecture to allow scalability, see the new Flash Kit 2 post coming up soon.

ASP is painfully slow compared to php, FK used to run on ASP but NT is such a slow OS compared to unix and apache which is why we moved over.