Subscriber Customizations Temporarily Deactivated

[Jason Dunn]

As regular Pocket PC Thoughts readers are aware, the past six months have been rough on our server - it's been suffering stability problems from exceedingly high load (which happens when lots of people visit it). We've had daily phpBB "critical error" messages, and it's been common to have the site become unavailable one or more times a day. When we added an extra 2 GB of RAM two weeks ago, it helped out immensely - it gave us a bit of breathing room, but we're still having daily traffic spikes where our server groans under the load. That means if we get a high-traffic external link (Slashdot, Google News, etc.) our server will collapse again.<br /><br />Several weeks back we installed some code that allows us to look at every PHP script running on the server and to see which ones were using the most resources. We were surprised to learn that the #1 resource hog is the subscriber customization script - the one that allows subscribers to turn off advertising, customize the right-hand columns, and set the number of stories that appear on the home page. That last one is the most resource-intensive of all.<br /><br />For the next 72 hours or so, we're going to deactivate 100% of the subscriber customization features and monitor what happens to our server load. Many of the dynamic components on our site are cached, so we're trying to reduce the number of remaining dynamic elements to figure out which ones we should keep and which ones we should drop.<br /><br />I appreciate subscriber support immensely, but I hope you'll graciously put up with the "generic" site for a few days in order to give us time to complete our research. The end goal being, of course, a faster and more stable server for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

[Jonathon Watkins]

All the best with the tuning! I look forward to seeing a much zippier PPCT. 8)

[OSUKid7]

I can still customize (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/customize.php) the site, and I still see the custom right column and no ads (although I just enabled them now), so maybe it's still cached? Not sure. Best of luck with the research and hope to see a faster site. :D

[surur]

How about an extra server just for subscribers. I understand there is only a few 10 000's of us. If you move us of to a separate (even slower) machine your main machine serving only static content should be able to deal with the flash crowds quite easily.

Surur

[Dazbot]

How about an extra server just for subscribers. I understand there is only a few 10 000's of us. If you move us of to a separate (even slower) machine your main machine serving only static content should be able to deal with the flash crowds quite easily.

Surur

I agree, I think with so many people visiting the site maybe its time for an additional server or two to distribute the load and of course some code optimisation.

I hope you get to the bottom of the problem soon.

Darren

[Jason Dunn]

I agree, I think with so many people visiting the site maybe its time for an additional server or two to distribute the load and of course some code optimisation.

I'm not opposed to getting a second server, but it's not as simple as plugging one in and having everything work right - you need to get to the bottom of what's causing the load and figure out what part of the puzzle you want to move to the other box. That's what we're trying to figure out now. ;-)

[OSUKid7]

How about an extra server just for subscribers. I understand there is only a few 10 000's of us. If you move us of to a separate (even slower) machine your main machine serving only static content should be able to deal with the flash crowds quite easily.
If it really were a "subscriber-only" server, wouldn't the main server still have to determine if the user was a subscriber or non-subscriber, and then forward to the other server if it's a subscriber? That sounds like it uses some unnecessary bandwidth. A general second server sounds good, but synchronizing the data between the two doesn't sound easy.

[Janak Parekh]

If it really were a "subscriber-only" server, wouldn't the main server still have to determine if the user was a subscriber or non-subscriber, and then forward to the other server if it's a subscriber?
There's a number of tricks one could employ for that.

The real tricky aspect of a subscriber server is having a common database backend. We might need three servers: a subscriber frontend, a nonsubscriber frontend, and a DB. We may have to ultimately follow that path, but it takes lots of planning.

--janak