Database Upgrades (aka Why We Had Downtime)

[Carl]

Update
 Folks on at 11PM-1AM GMT -5:00 probably noticed some downtime. I was making some tweaks to the server that I'm finally experienced enough to pull off. It worked out fine, despite about an hour's outage. This will help us when many requests for pages are hitting the server at once. The database in particular is more efficient at serving multiple requests at the same time. You may notice some improvements day in/day out, and you might not. Some people are often on when the server is experiencing the most load, so they may like it. Feel free to provide your feedback.


Previously,

One change you may notice is that I changed the number of posts per page from 10 to 20. You should still see the top post in the same length of time, no matter your connection speed. This will reduce the amount of data you need to download while browsing here. This will have a positive effect on our response times.

I enabled a mod called pretty urls that will make the addresses of topics more meaningful. Link should still work, only redirect to the new addresses. This means I probably don't even need to modify the guide to make those links to the forum work correctly.

This will theoretically help the forum to rank higher in the search engines, and bring us more guests and potential members.

I'm sorry if the posts per page inconveniences you. I expect it to be OK for most people. Others will actually like it. I believe it's necessary and helpful overall or I wouldn't do it. Still, feel free to share your feedback here, positive or negative.

Edit: to show increase.

[CarlosLordofTacos]

Is 20 a reduction or an increase?

[Carl]

An increase from 10.

[Natsuko]

Thank you for doing that Carl. When you changed the posts per page to twenty, my lap top acted quicker when I looked at topic. That's helpful for me, because sometimes my laptop will just take hours to load pages, and I can't wait hours to look at your forum. Thanks again!

[Esther1981]

Phew. That's a relief Carl. I thought I was going insane, all of a sudden threads got less pages. I even PM'd Pam about it but I then decided to look in here and see if there was an explanation. Sorry Pam and thanks Carl!

[xFezIsAFreakx]

Yeah, my laptop is loading the pages faster too now. Thanks, Carl.

[Carl]

You're welcome. I made a few little tweaks to the titles of some boards to help them appear when people look for forums for that specific topic.

[VampirePlasma]

Thanks Carl! My laptop is faster now, alot faster.

[Micler]

Thank you, Carl! I didn't really have any problems before, but it's a lot more efficient now

[Carl]

I'm glad the last task is over. See the update. I think I'm done under the hood for now.

[GlassMirrors]

Thank you for the updates, Carl! My laptop, like most of everyone else's, is running more efficiently now also.