Hi Folks,
I haven't really discussed this on the forums yet, but there is a far more serious reason for my migrating the forum over to a new software platform, other than the additional features. The demand which the Doll Forum places on the server is absolutely incredible! This is no longer a cosy mom and pop shop. If anyone has noticed there are times where there are over 100 people using the forum at exactly the same time.
The old UBB system was never designed to handle the load (number of people) who use the Doll Forum concurrently. When I was watching it run on the other server, the CPU & hard drive usage went way above what the server should have been running at. Everything needed to move to a software platform that used a real database to handle everything.
Basically, if Bill would have left the forum running on a normal hosting service I estimate that it would have taken about 1 more year before there would be no one capable of hosting it any longer. At least now it is scalable as a direct result of the forum using mySQL as its data engine. I believe that the service can now easily handle up to 300 concurrent users without a need to scale up. And scaling up can now be done by locating the database on a separate dedicate server devoted to only handling the database requests.
Ish
Why we changed Forums
Why we changed Forums
[i]"Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs." ~Lily Tomlin[/i]
Harddrive size?
Hey Ish,
What's the size of the harddrive the forums on? Does size matter?
What's the size of the harddrive the forums on? Does size matter?
Hi Corben,
It's actually not the size of the drive that is the limiting factor. It is the number of times that it needs to be "hit" to obtain a piece of information.
The old forum required a large number of file opens and closes just to produce one forum page each time someone asked to see "it" (all "flat file" accesses). And it had to search through each file that it opened to obtain the information that it needed.
So it ends up "hitting" the hard drive a couple hundred times for each request to display a forum page (times 100 users at the same time). The UBB software is simply not designed to handle that much traffic effectively. It's all based on flat files (and lots of them).
Thanks,
Ish
It's actually not the size of the drive that is the limiting factor. It is the number of times that it needs to be "hit" to obtain a piece of information.
The old forum required a large number of file opens and closes just to produce one forum page each time someone asked to see "it" (all "flat file" accesses). And it had to search through each file that it opened to obtain the information that it needed.
So it ends up "hitting" the hard drive a couple hundred times for each request to display a forum page (times 100 users at the same time). The UBB software is simply not designed to handle that much traffic effectively. It's all based on flat files (and lots of them).
Thanks,
Ish
[i]"Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs." ~Lily Tomlin[/i]
