Topic: Pruning

[Clive]

It's spring time (allegedly!) and time for a bit of pruning of old threads.  Why?  Because we believe that we have allowed the forum to get too big and that is the chief cause of the intermittant slowness many of us have experienced.  Only threads in non technical boards are being pruned and mostly only those over 18 months old.  Post counts are not affected.

[chorleydave]

I've noticed it is rather slow again.  I haven't said anything because I suspected that crappy broadband connection of mine might be the culprit, but evidently not.

I know I have asked this before, but is the slowness definitely nothing to do with those rather nice, but rather large signatures?

[sam]

to be honest i dont think so. it seems a read out of database issue.

[Sandra]

Afraid not Dave as we tried it without them and it made no difference.
Also its a random thing so if it was the sigs it would be more constant and would have no effect on the main page.
When its on a go slow for me its often the main page thats the slowest to open and that has no sigs and not much in the way of graphics  

[Simon]

From what I understand, the Index page is likely to be the slowest, as it has the most work to do, linking all the listings to the database.  I have to admit, since Clive's post massacre, I haven't noticed any lagging at all.

[sam]

simon is completely right. it is the accessing the database that slows the whole thing down... a bit of background reading on my part has verified a few things to me. Phpbb uses awful sql queries and these are slow. I will see what I can find / do about making these faster. So basically when you open the page it executes are large query which causes the database to supply lots of info and do lots of useless searches. Lots of access can then cause the server to get pushed to far.. thus casuing the now termed "mini-outages".

Well thats what I think / hope is the case! :-)