Fix it already

What with the recent acquisition and all of the rigamarole that we have had to endure since, can we get

'The Unified View is database-intensive and the database has become very busy." error to go away once

and for all already? Do what needs to be done, please. Sure, things take time, blah blah but it's downright

ridiculous and can't be good for e-biz especially since this is a regular occurrence. Yeah, I could go

through each category individually but those websites that don't offer a unified view or View Recent

Activity type options I just do not go to again. About to stop coming here... How many threads need to be

started to make it known that this is a constant problem?

I'm not sure why you would assume that we aren't aware of the problem. The status of this issue has been addressed multiple times in recent threads. Here are a couple:

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00NaWT

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00NVGc

We do not want crappy site performance any more than the users do. And we are doing everything that we can to improve things. But as I said in one of the above threads, there is no one single action that can be taken to magically fix things. The problems are caused by a number of different issues and have to be addressed a number of different ways. We are working on all of them.

Anthony--

I've been a member for a year. I've been extremely active but also disappointed. I probably

won't be renewing my membership come January because of bad site performance and

because the critique aspect of the site, which was my main reason for joining, is not well

formulated.

It's not personal Josh, you just are the one answering.

I didn't mean to say you didn't know about the problem, quite the contrary. If it's data

base intensive as the error message states, get someone to fix it. Nobody cares the

reasons why this continues to happen, just that it happens all the time. Other sites DO

NOT have this problem, and if they did they make damned sure it doesn't happen again.

Explanations as to why help nothing. Posting two threads about the problem means

nothing as well. I could make a thread everyday.

Fred,I will never give money to this site again, not really sure why I did, except for that

$25 write off.

<i>"Nobody cares the reasons why this continues to happen, just that it happens all the time."</i>

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People don't need to care about the reasons why it happens, they just need to understand that the process to fix them is not as easy as calling a plumber to fix the blocked pipe.

<p>

We are doing everything we can to improve things. Buying new hardware, moving to a better server co-location, improving the load-balancing and so on. But those improvements aren't like plugging in a new external hard drive. To move to new hardware, we have to back up everything, re-create the site on the new hardware, run load testing to make sure the hardware is setup correctly, run user testing to make sure the site is set up right, fix the bugs, get another current backup of the site (since time will have passed during the testing and bug fixing), test again, and so on. A move to a new server location is the same sort of process.

<p>

All websites go through performance issues. Photo.net's are compounded by the fact that historically we did not keep up with hardware/back-end upgrades as well as we should have given the site's growth. Namemedia is putting money and manpower into correcting that mistake.

<p>

The wheels are turning and improvements are moving forward faster than they have in a long time.

Josh, I can only begin to understand the difficulty of the situation and the complexity of addressing it fully. I do not doubt, at all, the sincerity of yourself and the staff in trying to address the current state of affairs.

I do wonder though if Photo.net understands fully the frustration of very poor site performance on your membership. While I have heard about the things you are doing/have done to try and improve the functioning of the site from a hardware and programming perspective, I have seen little attempt to actually change the site to improve its functioning. I would think that if you were having consistent overburdening of your resources, there would be some external attempt to limit the demands on those resources.

You are clearly working on increasing the capacity of the site. How about temporarily limiting the demand from users? Rationing some activities to help overall site function would seem to me to be a perfectly reasonable option. For example, perhaps you could -- temporarily -- reduce the volume of the archived material available to members and (perhaps more importantly) to search engines.

Only your technical staff would know where the greatest demands are. But, for the sake of illustration, let's say they are in displaying the galleries in the TRP interface. You could reduce the number of displayed photos on each screen or the size of the display or -- something -- to reduce the demands from that activity.

Anyways, I look forward to when I can use Photo.net as seamlessly and swiftly as other site. I currently try to time my visits to off-hours and weekends.

i've been getting annoyed a bit at this error too, and I'm wondering if there isn't something that can be done to improve things without having to resort to buying hardware.

a couple of things that may be worth looking at are:

1. restricting the number of threads visible in the 'unified' view to the latest, say, 50. If the view was paged with a relatively small number of threads per page, the load would be split up much more between the pages, and each page would be much less resource-expensive.

2. caching: considering how busy photo.net obviously is, using server-cached pages, even with a short expiry time of maybe 5 minutes, would make a huge difference to the load on the database. even if only the unified forum view was cached, i bet it would make a massive difference. In addition to this, the unified view at the moment has a "no cache" pragma in the header - requesting clients to cache the page locally could also make a huge difference with very little work required.

i have experience of doing this sort of thing for high-traffic websites (although not with AOL server, admittedly) - I'm happy to give advice or help if asked.