the site is like seriously 3 times faster.

thanks alex!

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EDIT by Alex (not alex.s :)): I merged these threads before seeing that alex.s had actually beaten me to the punch.

After the colo power failure a few weeks ago, I had to move the server to a temporary one. It was working fine, but it was a little busy, and performance wasn't as good as it could be. Also, it was an older server that was getting a little expensive for what we were receiving.

This morning, I moved ninjette.org over to a new server. This required a change in IP address, so it might be a short while before everyone sees this new one, but the total downtime was only 20 minutes or so. There may be some small bugs I didn't catch yet where the IP address needs to be manually changed, so if you run into any of them, please post up in this thread or just PM me.

Sorry that there was any downtime at all, but glad it wasn't too extensive. :thumbup:

Thx, Alex! As more folks come back on, I'm not sure if you'll continue to see a 3-fold performance increase, but it should still be noticeably faster than it was before. :thumbup:

/merged with other server move thread

I hate when ninjette is down MAKES ME PANIC.

I hate when ninjette is down

http://www.buffalorising.com/ME_TOO_BIG116.jpg

:p

My Firefox tab doesn't show the green K now....

This have something to do with the change over?

It shouldn't, the favicon is still showing up for me fine on chrome and firefox. You can try clearing your cache?

It shouldn't, the favicon is still showing up for me fine on chrome and firefox. You can try clearing your cache?

Thanks Alex. That worked. You da man... :thumbup:

OK - moved it again this morning. We were on a standard "shared" VPS up until today. Rimuhosting offers something they called "semi-dedicated" VPS, where instead of sharing the host with a few dozen VM's, this host is limited to 5 or 6. The physical hardware itself is not much faster (or slower), but there are just less people using it, so the response time should be more consistent. It is three times as expensive as what we were paying, but I do want to see if it makes a difference. If it doesn't, we can always go back just as easily.

At some point we might need our own dedicated server, but the cost would be doubled yet again. The advantage of our own server would be access to a ton of cheap disk space. On the VPS's, the disk space is somewhat limited, but to be honest this site doesn't use nearly as much disk as I would have expected. (Most folks tend to host their pictures on another site and just link them here, if they were all stored here the storage needs would increase).

Sorry about the downtime. Was optimizing a database table, it crashed, and I was on to other things so didn't see it for awhile.

But the good news is that all of the tables are now completely optimized, and at least from what I'm seeing, the site is now as fast as it's ever been. There are 150+ users online, but searches, opening up new threads in new tabs, and anything else I'm trying has .1 to .2 second response time. I think that the corruption in the "post" table may have been part of the reason for things to be slowing down before, but it's always hard to track root causes of things like this.

Really quick alex. Good job :thumbup:

It is three times as expensive as what we were paying, but I do want to see if it makes a difference.

I see my membership dues have increased to 5x what they were before, are you pocketing the rest?

On a side note, here is the new logo you asked me to create

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b276/seanvoight/arc_ninjette_logo.png

(Most folks tend to host their pictures on another site and just link them here, if they were all stored here the storage needs would increase).

I can't speak for why other people do this, but the reason I do it is that I don't like the little thumbnail images that occur when uploading to ninjette. I prefer my pics to show up full size.

:D Love the logo.

I can't speak for why other people do this, but the reason I do it is that I don't like the little thumbnail images that occur when uploading to ninjette. I prefer my pics to show up full size.

If the pics are in albums here, they can be linked full-size without thumbnails. But the normal attachments to posts are thumbnailed. When someone clicks on the thumbnail, they do show the full-size pic, but you're right, they do have to click it.

This is one of those decisions that does directly affect bandwidth costs; if all locally stored pics showed fullsize on each thread load, the bandwidth the site uses would go up a noticeable amount, which does directly translate to $. I only pay for what we need, so we're always right at the cap.

Just so we know how much to appreciate you . . . how much does this site cost you and how much do you make on advertising?

Is there a noticeable difference to you if we click "yes" in your User CP/Options in the "View motorcycle-related advertising" option? If so, I'm happy to encourage it here and elsewhere.

If the answer is that you aren't out of pocket (which I doubt), I'm happy and no further details needed. But if you are out of pocket, I wouldn't mind doing a bit of fundraising to see what we can do as a community to better support the site.

Just so we know how much to appreciate you . . .

http://bringingforthworldequality.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/infinity.jpg

:)

Ad revenues more than make up for hosting and other costs on the site. I do have that checkbox in the User CP for people to disable advertising if they want, but it toggles back on again at the beginning of each month for everybody. Of course people can use adblock and all of the other plug-ins to get rid of the google ads everywhere, and if they are so inclined, I'm not terribly worried.

Not going to get wealthy with sites like these (unless I had 1000 of them), but the ads are enough for a few tanks of gas here and there on top of the fixed costs, and I'm grateful for them. There's no need now, and I can't foresee a need in the future, when I'd have to solicit any membership or other types of fees in order to keep this place up and running. I'm not silly enough to turn down the generous offers that some folks have made over time when creating large group buys on the site, and I'm thankful for those as well. :thumbup:

I've started clicking on the ads once in a while in hopes that you make a little more. I want a shirt too.

I can't speak for why other people do this, but the reason I do it is that I don't like the little thumbnail images that occur when uploading to ninjette. I prefer my pics to show up full size.

I usually host the pics on another site because I never took the 3 seconds it takes to figure out how to host the pics on this site and format them to be exactly where you want them in your post. All I know is if I click 'add attachment' I am shown a box with a lot of numbers and limitations that pushes my ADD to its limits, so I just stick with copying and pasting the img links from flikr.

Safari got angry, and I was still getting emails but couldn't access. Killed Safari and restarted, came back up fine.

Yay faster site.

Can you believe some forums charge a membership!??!?!

Faster ninjette.org = faster ninjette. My top speed increased by at least 2 mph simply because of this. :D

I've started clicking on the ads once in a while in hopes that you make a little more. I want a shirt too.

I appreciate it. If the ad is interesting to you, feel free to click it, that's why they are there. But - don't go crazy and start clicking everything in sight. Google has obscenely sophisticated algorithms to try and detect "real" vs "fake" ad clicks, and if flagged, the site can actually make less money than it would otherwise.

Well, I usually forget, so it's really only once in a while, and usually motorcycle related :p

Ninjette feels slower lately

Maybe I am sucking up all the bandwidth :idunno:

The page load speeds have been pretty constant the past month. I was hoping that the new server would be significantly faster. Turns out that it's not much faster, but it is much more consistent. It's a much rarer occurrence for the traffic to spike on someone else's site on the server, causing slow-downs for ninjette. If it does get slow for a few moments, it actually is more likely that it is due to traffic hitting our own site here.

I've gotten accustomed to using those little > arrows to skip to the new posts in the thread (most awesome feature ever), but lately, like last week or so, it seems like it sometimes just hangs and takes a very long time to skip down. It seems to happen randomly and isn't consistent on any thread. I thought it was my connection for a minute but everytime I test it I get a constant 11.6Mbps so I figured it had to be ninjette... Who knows, maybe I'll just give my middle finger a workout and manually scroll alllllllll the way down :Twofinger:

I'm not seeing those slowdowns, and I use those same arrows to read the site as well. Are you using chrome? FF? Might be worth clearing the cache and other local files just as a check. (not highly likely, but possible)

I'm using Opera :D

Cleared everything out, will see what happens

I'm on Chrome, and notice the same thing. I've thought about clearing my cache, but honestly I've forgotten a lot of my passwords... :o

K - I'll optimize the db to see if that helps. One thing to try is to turn off ads in your user control panel. Honestly the only complex graphics on the page are the ads, and they are also pulled from separate servers from the site itself.

ohhhhhhhh :( but I like the ads! they're fun to play the guessing game of what will pop up next!!

I've gotten accustomed to using those little > arrows to skip to the new posts in the thread (most awesome feature ever) ... Who knows, maybe I'll just give my middle finger a workout and manually scroll alllllllll the way down :Twofinger:

Even better feature is arranging the view to show new posts first: User Control Panel --> Edit Options --> Thread Display Options --> Linear Newest First. No more little arrows or middle finger workouts for you.

K - I'll optimize the db to see if that helps. One thing to try is to turn off ads in your user control panel. Honestly the only complex graphics on the page are the ads, and they are also pulled from separate servers from the site itself.

Ad in the upper right for me yesterday for me was Suzuki GSXR add touting good financing. I was deeply upset and offended. :p

Moved the server again last night. We are now on our own box. It has a slightly slower processor than the prior box, but that was running 4 or 5 other VPS's on it at the same time. I'm hoping and expecting that performance should be both pretty good, and pretty consistent. If things are slowing down now at times, it truly is due to ninjette.org traffic. :thumbup:

Ninjette.org traffic for sure!:thumbup:

That wasn't necessary, since I've gotten diablo 3 I've rarely come onto this site. Traffic should be down at least 70%

OK - it's screaming along now. I think the server is actually overkill. What was happening was at least one of the database tables was slightly corrupted, so the index wasn't working very well. It still worked, but worked much more slowly than it should have been. Now the server workload is a fraction of what it was, and the response times are great, even when I'm doing more db maintenance in the background.

Sorry about the up and down behavior of the site over the last day. Moved to a new box as mentioned above in this thread. Really wanted to take advantage of its capabilities, so have worked to get the db fully optimized, and now that is complete. Also have changed a number of the config files to use more of the memory and processors we now have access to, so the site should be working pretty well all around.

Please let me know if you see anything strange, and I'll take a look. Far as I can tell, all is well, but you never can be completely sure.