Based on the "fun" I had trying to access RB Monday morning and Monday evening....I'd say "no effect" so far.

Based on the mixed reviews, it seems like the best we can say is that there might be some improvement but not substantial improvement. I'm not sure it's worth doing a test on the placebo effect. As long as it's happening often enough that it discourages members (much less guests) from logging in, the conclusion is going to be that we need to continue to do whatever we can to improve the site.

I would also like to add my own thank you to T-Hawk for doing what you have and for working on the problem.

And just because I am curious--not pessimistic--if we weren't to hear from KoP and more problems were to crop up, would there be any possible way to migrate the forums without KoP? (Note: I know NOTHING about server management, vBulletin, or forum moderation)

I have not encountered the busy message since T-Hawk's post. Before the post, I would encounter it on average once a day (though it was more common for it to occur several times on one day and then none the next).

Important caveat: I usually check the forums at non-peak hours (most often late at night EST).

Yeah, "I think it might be maybe a little better" isn't what I was angling for. Need hard data. Now I just remembered that I'm a programmer. I wrote a script to hit the forum home page once per minute to see if it returns a "too busy" response.

I'll run that for the next 24 hours to establish a baseline, then flip that setting for browser caching. If that does improve the situation over the following 24 hours, we'll leave it that way. If not, we'll assume that the server load is our noisy neighbors on the shared host and I'll turn off the vBulletin load check.

I have a VPS web-host around that I'm barely using. If you want, I could host a migration. Also, I do have a web-server at home, if people wanted, I'm offering that too.

Never host any site you want to regularly access at home. Home connections are not reliable at all and it's just asking for trouble. I think sunrise would agree Though he does a great job keeping pitboss server online, it's inevitable that problems arise when hosting from home.

As to migration I've offered an account on my dedi server as well but we need to wait for KoP to pass along full control otherwise it can't happen.

I do host my gaming association's website from home. We've got a good network admin so we've not had any issues. (I do have a decent connection here in Sweden. :P)

Ok, I have some data. Over 24 hours, there were about ten periods when the server went into ''too busy". Each lasted exactly five minutes; I have to figure that vBulletin always waits that much time, it can't be a server process running that consistently.

I've now flipped the setting to not send no-cache headers, telling the browser to cache. You may see more need to reload pages manually when moving around. I'll continue monitoring over the next 24 hours to see if that made any difference. I gather that most vBulletin setups with any kind of load do turn that off so we've been the exception to the usual.

As for moving hosts, we'll address that when KoP returns to the discussion. I've been wanting an excuse to get and learn my way around a Linode for a while and hosting RB might be a good reason.

Thank you T-Hawk, for being so proactive about this =)

Bobchillingworth Wrote:Thank you T-Hawk, for being so proactive about this =)

Yeah this. It's greatly appreciated.