Got a Problem? Read this before posting:)

Vexorg

In our continued effort to squeeze every last ounce of performance from the servers, you may or may not experience occasional problems, odd looking pages, odd items appearing on pages, sometimes no pages and sometime just plain funky goodness, etc etc.

Please dont fret, its most likely one of the more technical admins gently persuading the operating system to be more complient, or smacking the software about to make it perform better.

Normal service will be resumed as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience,

No Really.

Vex.

Gone West

No problem, a page refresh is all it takes to make said problems go away anyhow, folks.

Any word on what is/was causing the bottlenecks yet?

Bard

FuzzyLogic wrote:

No problem, a page refresh is all it takes to make said problems go away anyhow, folks.

Any word on what is/was causing the bottlenecks yet?

This is one of Ireland's most visited and used web sites. Something would tell me that the unprecedented and unpredictable scale of the popularity of this web site and hence the large and constant demands made on the web and database servers would be the primary cause of the "bottlenecks".

Take into account also the possible numbers of people who try occasionally to bring the server down with DoS and similar attacks and hack attempts, the amount of search and other queries which are run on the database (which slow things down a tad, particularly with many thousands of users) - and the fact that despite its clear brilliance, vBulletin is (probably! - I'm no expert on this...) not the most efficient of front-end systems that a web forum could be running.

The admins do a brilliant job just keeping the site up and running. The few short periods of down-time or under-performance are an understandable side-effect of having such an excellent and popular resource at our fingertips.

Hurrah for boards.ie, etc. etc.

Sparky

Hurrah is right! Also the fact that they are working at this time on a friday night.

ecksor

I think I'm muddling more than working. Cloud guilt tripped me into it.

Ruu_Old

Probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference but the buttons on the index page "Chat Rooms" and "Usenet News" seem to be inactive and maybe could be removed if not in use (I know the chatroom is gone). Just an idea.:)

nobodythere

Aye cheers, what's with the Subbed link at the top of the page not working.

ozt9vdujny3srf

Have you subscribed to any forums?

nobodythere

No but I'm set to subscribe to every thread I post in.

ozt9vdujny3srf

That option is gone from the subscriber menu as far as i can see.

Found it yesterday...

boards.ie -> Forum Utilities -> Subscribed Threads.

I did much prefer having it beside my subbed fora.

Gone West

Bard wrote:

This is one of Ireland's most visited and used web sites. Something would tell me that the unprecedented and unpredictable scale of the popularity of this web site and hence the large and constant demands made on the web and database servers would be the primary cause of the "bottlenecks".

Take into account also the possible numbers of people who try occasionally to bring the server down with DoS and similar attacks and hack attempts, the amount of search and other queries which are run on the database (which slow things down a tad, particularly with many thousands of users) - and the fact that despite its clear brilliance, vBulletin is (probably! - I'm no expert on this...) not the most efficient of front-end systems that a web forum could be running.

The admins do a brilliant job just keeping the site up and running. The few short periods of down-time or under-performance are an understandable side-effect of having such an excellent and popular resource at our fingertips.

Hurrah for boards.ie, etc. etc.

err, you didn't understand my post.
The admin are enabling and disabling different features of the boards in an effort to find out what exactly is taxing the servers more than they could be. afaik.
Should have saved yourself a rant