I've noticed sporadic "hiccups" in the site's performance, i.e., it would be running fine, then a page times out or the server returns a blank page. I traced it down to not enough memory, but the host provider said they could not add more to that particular server. So I've migrated the site to a new server and hopefully that will be the end of the hiccups.

Please let me know if you noticed something not working as expected or missing (e.g., images).

I see that HB migrated to a faster server last night. Maybe Dan could give the old server to Mark at Coffeegeek!

sweaner wrote:I see that HB migrated to a faster server last night. Maybe Dan could give the old server to Mark at Coffeegeek!

I find it amusing that this was already fast and you've chosen to make it faster and CG is is still and has been painfully slow for the whole time I've been visiting both.

Ira

What can I say, I've worked for years in performance analysis / remediation; there's no such thing as too fast.

In all fairness to Coffeegeek, it's custom code that was not originally designed with high traffic in mind. Mark has tossed an insane amount of hardware at it to improve performance; there's only so much you can do if the software doesn't scale. In contrast, HB is based on phpBB version 3, which scales to mega-site traffic with ease. Mark plans a complete rewrite of Coffeegeek and promises lots of new features in addition to scalability.

I'll be paying careful attention to the performance of the site over the next few weeks. It seems zippier, that's for certain, but it's also the weekend. Monday/Tuesday is usually the busiest days of the week. My preference is page displays in 0.2 seconds; 0.5 seconds under load. The weighted average "health stats" are shown at the bottom of each page, e.g.:

Overall speed: fast, current page: 0.2s, avg: 0.2s, max: 1.6s

It covers the last hour of activity.

Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing the specs of your new server? Are you guys on a single server setup? I happen to run a forum for a living (a very, very large one), so I'm always curious about what's behind the scenes.

Hi Dan,
Not sure if this has anything to do with the new servers, but the RSS feed I usually use to view HB doesn't seem to be getting updated. Is there more than one feed? Thanks
Kaelin

Originally HB was on a shared host. Later I upgraded to a virtual dedicated server. Now it's on "grid hosting", i.e., shared hosting that's not tied to a single box. There's less admin flexibility than with a dedicated server, but it's cheap and appears to work faster than the VDS.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that hosting companies were moving in that direction just yet. Sounds nice though, if you don't have a lot of special needs, it's probably a lot more reliable than a VPS. Unfortunately the size of our forums necessitates 10 servers, the largest of which is a Quad Quadcore Xeon w/ 16gb of ram

I wish our hosting plan started at $4.99 a month!

Is it just me or were the forums down earlier today and generating a 403 error?