Recently many of you may have noticed that Bluelight has been running rather slowly, and that it has been difficult to load certain forums (such as Social and New To XTC) at certain times of the day.
This is because we are gettign an extraordinarily high server load. This is NOT quite the same thing as a bandwidth issue.
This would not be such a problem except that it is causing some dificulty with Bluelight's primary mission of harm-reduction and spread of good information about E and other related drugs the Bluelight community tends to use.
The next paragraph contains a bunch of technical gobbledygook that explains what exactly the problem is:
Every time the Forum index of a forum is requested (by, for example, entering the forum or hitting REFRESH from the forum index) or every time a thread is posted to or edited, the server has to dynamically redraw a web page,creating work for its CPU. This results in bottlenecks that cause the slow loading or lack of loading that we have been experiencing.
We are taking several different actions to try to fix or ease this problem,including upgrading our server's processing capacity (short term) and redesigning how Bluelight's discussion board works (on the nuts-and-bolts side) in Bluelight 2.0 (long term).
In the meantime, there are a couple of things we need to ask of you to help Bluelight function til we can get this fixed.
1) THINK BEFORE YOU POST.
If it can wait, or you don't think a large portion of the Bluelight community will benefit from it, don't post it. I am not goign to attempt what is and what is not a frivolous post, but you guys all know what they are.
2)MORE IMPORTANTLY-USE THE 'BACK' BUTTON ON YOUR BROWSER INSTEAD OF HITTING THE LINKS ON THE SITE TO RETURN TO THE FORUM INDEX VIEW.
The forum index view is the list of topics of each forum. If you go back to the previously loaded list of these instead of having to have the server generate a new one it reduces server load.
ALSO, CUTTING DOWN ON HITTING THE 'REFRESH' BUTTON TO SEE IF ANYONE HAS ADDED NEW RESPONSES TO A TOPIC will help as well.
Note that READING TOPICS has little or no addition to the server load, just LOADING THE INDEXES or POSTING.
None of Bluelight's forums are threatened by this; no forums will be closed.
this is just so you all can do your part in keeping Bluelight functional until we can get a solution.
Mods and Admins, please help out by keeping this thread bumped near the top of each of your forums.