LFAD-Slowing down?

[Michelle]

Agreeing with Sierra and kittyo9. It is so slow, it's really starting to annoy me.

It's actually become so bad for me I've had to pretty much stop posting.

Really glad it's not just me! Hopefully the issues get fixed soon... I'm having the same problems as everyone else who has posted today.


Rawr.

Unfortunately, money is tight and the only way to really fix the issues is to move the entire site to a new (dedicated) host which is extremely expensive.

I will try to disable some things to see if it helps the speed of the site.

[Sierra]

Sorry Michelle, while I TOTALLY understand how costly it is to run a forum but if these problems keep up for me it just shows that a forum is basically dying and I'll move on. Especially since it's not readable or even postable.

You should consider asking members for a fundraiser. I've donated $30+ to different forums I belong to in order to keep them running.

[Michelle]

Sorry Michelle, while I TOTALLY understand how costly it is to run a forum but if these problems keep up for me it just shows that a forum is basically dying and I'll move on. Especially since it's not readable or even postable.

This simply is just not true. You read my post and you posted a reply.

As I said, I'm disabling some things on the site to speed things up. I just got rid of the quick navigation menu which can apparently generate a lot of HTML and bandwidth usage. I've also dropped down the number of messages you can have in your inbox. I'm seeing now if there are things I can delete and other settings I can change.

You should consider asking members for a fundraiser. I've donated $30+ to different forums I belong to in order to keep them running.

In 2008, I did take donations when the site was just starting. But I refuse to beg for money now. New hosting will cost thousands of dollars a year - which would not be sustained very long on donations anyway. As I said earlier in this thread, it is a goal of mine to get the hosting within a year (without donations). It has to be something I can reliably afford month to month myself without depending on anyone else. If I am relying on donations and I don't get enough donations one month, the site would completely shut down until I make a payment - obviously not very professional and something I want to avoid entirely. So that's why I have to wait until I can afford it on my own without any worries.

[Michelle]

Okay, member list is gone. Quick navigation is gone. Those were nice things to have, but we don't need them. They were big suckers. I have changed the way the site handles queries for user's latest posts. All these things should help and show some improvement.

[Michelle]

Just removed member awards (vbexperience). Right now I'm figuring out how to disable customized profiles.

Please let me know if you notice any improvement at all after the changes I've made. They mostly will help speed issues. There is not much I can do about the database errors. I doubt the changes I made were enough to fix those since those seem to be host related issues (not allowing enough connections and resources at times when the forum has scheduled tasks that use a lot of connections/resources).

[Michelle]

Okay, custom profiles are gone.

The site (main forum page) only takes 1.29 seconds to load (used this speed test: https://www.websitegoodies.com/tools/speed-test.php)

Before the changes it took about 1.75 seconds. The difference is marginal. And 1.75 seconds wasn't bad to start out with (1-2 seconds is considered good for any website). So I don't know if you guys will be satisfied or not, but I tried.

[Michelle]

I've also had an issue every now and then with my comments not posting-- I will click "post quick reply" and it will say, "are you sure you want to leave this page?" even though I'm not leaving it.

the "Are you sure you want to leave the page" and database error has happened to me too..

This is a vbulletin issue and not just an LFAD issue. I have looked this up and it seems to have been a bug for awhile. Other vb4 forums have complained of the same problem: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...this-page-quot

On another thread I found, vb staff say to make sure you click in the Quick Reply box and it won't do this? https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...=1#post2237743 He also says to clear your browser cache (I personally clear my browser cache on a regular basis, so maybe that's why I haven't ever noticed this problem myself? So maybe try doing that.)

If this continues to be a problem, I could disable the quick reply feature and make it so you have to click a button to reply (you'd get taken to "go advanced" to reply by default).

Keep me updated. Let me know if clearing your browser caches solves the problem (here's how: https://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser%27s-Cache).

[lyonsgirl]

Thanks, Michelle! I truly appreciate all you've done for us and thanks for keeping LFAD running.

[kittyo9]

I'm definitely noticing an improvement in the speed of the site. I think removing some of those things did help minimize the excess code clutter. I'll keep posting for a while and let you know if the issue comes up again after I clear my cache.

[elina]

Mine seems to be working normally now. I'm sorry if I came out "whiny" in my post somehow, I didn't mean to. I guess the stuff you got rid of helped some.

Hope you know we all appreciate what you're doing for the site. I guess we might take it for granted, in a way. It must not be easy at times.

Anyway, thanks a lot Michelle

[Michelle]

I'm glad you guys have noticed a little improvement. It's not much but it was as much as I could do without moving the site.

I know no one mentioned this originally, but viewing blogs is still slow. I think it's the slowest of everything because of the work it has to do to compile the latest blog posts from everyone and then also display just the ones you have permission to view since some people's blogs are private and for only friends. I've tried to find ways to speed those queries up but can't find anything. I'll keep an eye out though.

[BabyDimples]

Have some settings been changed on here too? I went onto my profile, and it doesn't have the colour settings or the options to change it anymore, and neither do some others that I know had it. The storage limit in messages has also gone down to 25 from 250. Have I missed something? Is anyone else's doing this?

[BabyDimples]

Ohhh I just checked though the second page as I though this thread only had one page to it Sorry! I was a tad bit confused as to what was going on. Thank you Michelle for everything that you do to keep this site running. It is actually one of the main ways that me and Thomas can keep in touch apart from msn. Mainly because I work from 8-5 and facebook, hotmail, msn is obviously blocked from my work computer with the exception of quota time. So I really adore this site and have it open constantly at work

[Michelle]

Sadly the chat box is gone now I talked to support and they can see that it was using up a lot of CPU. So I decided to disable it for now. The only other thing that was using up lots of resources is showthread.php (which is used whenever you read a thread).

[snow_girl]

I've noticed a difference. I was also going to suggest getting rid of the chat, I've never used it.