The old one need some improvement. Hope yoou are just in a transition phase. Can not search by member name.
Yep, it is a trasition phase. Pre-Christmas, our normal traffic levels were around 700,000 page impressions a day. Come 27th of December and our traffic jumped to 1M a day and our server crashed six times during that day. Yesterday the same started happening and I was forced to look at features that could be stripped out in order to boost the performance of the servers until we get our new hardware setup finished. Well, it worked, no crashes after the search engine switch and we hit 1.2M page imps yesterday.. Now, our ad server has load levels of 4.0 - 5.5 during the peak hours (in Windows terms, the CPU usage is around 400 - 550 percent) and we thought a year ago that the five server setup we installed back then would be adequate for two or three years.. Not so The plan is to get seven Dual Xeon 2.8GHz boxes, four with 2GB of memory and three with 4GB of memory and SCSI RAID discs on each of them and hope that it would support the site for the next six months until we need to order a new dump truck to bring in more hardware
Thats what happens when you build the better "mousetrap". It is still the best site going, even with the growing pains.
rroettger: Yup, I'm definitely not complaining, just the speed of the growth has taken us by surprise and we haven't been able to cope with it quickly enough. The current traffic levels simply mean that we've been doing something right during the last six years, which is always a nice thing to know, I'd hate to come to realize after six years that we haven't achieved anything But ye, our aim is to boost the server capacity to match the new requirements and make it also in a way that when (not if ;-) we hit the ceiling again, we could simply add new nodes to the cluster rather than build the whole thing again. And we will up our monthly bandwidth allocation from the current 6 terabytes to 14 terabytes as well.
Nice plan, hope all goes smoothly. Of course it never does. lol Well one nice thing about the search is I can hit the back button. Keep up the great work and many thanks. yar
A minor suggestion, the Fonts for the word "search", "Quick Link", on page 2, "Search options," "Site-wide search" etc. could you make them mabye a point higher and / or, if that isn't possible, make them Bold like Forum is bold ? It does stand out and attracts attention, yes, just that little makes a big difference. Those using 15' screens need 20/10 vision to see it now, making it "stand out" HOPEFULLY" may help some of our s l o w e r p e o p l e to find , and, (dare I hope?) use the "Search" feature ? and yes, I can understand the word "transition" BUT we need that "Members search" to try to curtail double-posting - No worries, I know you'll do what you feel is right -
