Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: * * Major Connection Problems: A PLEA to Admin! * *

Shardz opened this issue on Dec 10, 2005 ยท 65 posts


destro75 posted Sat, 10 December 2005 at 8:02 AM

I just looked at Bondware's main site forums. The speed is quite better than here, but I wonder if that is because the software is better, or a combination of a small number of posts, and minimal traffic.

Most of the time lately I have been okay with the speed of the site. I haven't had many hangups, not nearly like there were a few months back.

I don't know how MySQL handles data, as I work with SQL Server, but maybe that is part of the problem. Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) such as images are hard for DBs to handle. Given the hundreds of gallery posts each day you have to figure there is almost always an image upload going on. My opinion on images has always been to save the path of a link to an image in a directory, rather than the image itself in the DB.

Given that images can be quite large (up to half a meg) and the fact that almost always there are two images being uploaded by one user at the same time (including the thumb) you have a big bottleneck on the DB. Combine that with people searching forums (another bottleneck) and 2k+ users surfing the site requesting pages (including image intensive pages like the marketplace and galleries) and you have a recipe for disaster.

I don't know enough about MySQL to judge it as a DB. I don't know how it handles things such as locks which even on industrial grade DBs are painful to deal with (I know.) I have to assume though, it isn't as ready to combat problems the way a SQL Server or Oracle could. It is a free, open source DB. Not that I believe it to be a bad product but you often get what you pay for. Please don't flame for these comments, I don't harbor ill will toward MySQL, in fact, I believe the product has been a boon to the web development world. That being said, there is a reason Wall Street doesn't house companies that run MySQL.

I think we should give Bondware the opportunity to upgade the site however they plan to. Remember, using this site doesn't cost you anything. Granted, merchants lose sales when people can't get to the products, but the common user pays nothing to post images and messages. Again, you often get what you pay for.

I am not trying to make excuses for Bondware. I, like all of you, get frustrated when I can't get to something. It's annoying that I am going to have to copy this whole message before trying to post, so I don't lose it to the black hole that is a session timeout, but such is life.

shrug Just hang in there all. There is war in Iraq, famine in Africa, tsunamis in Asia, billions in damage in the southern U.S. Life is too short to worry about slow-moving web sites.

Have a great day, a wonderful weekend, and Happy Holidays all!