"servers are busy"

[i386]

Re: "servers are busy"

Yup, but it's not static text...

Each piece of text lives in a table in the database. For every page that loads, the web server makes many requests to the database to retrieve all the pieces of text (titles, posts, dates, etc...). The database server can handle many requests at once however, when multiple requests are made for the same data those requests must be queued and handled in the order they were received. In other words you wait. Think of how many tables a search across multiple forums would need to be accessed. Sometimes all of this is done on a single server, sometimes the duties are split up among servers. I can only guess how iBoats has theirs set up. It takes some pretty high end equipment to serve this many users. Often this equipment and the software it runs will be marketed as "Enterprise". You though the "Marine tax" was bad? The "Enterprise tax" is much worse.

Well, that's a generalization anyway.

 

[lowkee]

Re: "servers are busy"

Any forum member will tell you, installing a bigger bilge pump doesn't fix that hole in the hull. It's no different with hardware for software problems.

I recently worked for a company which couldn't keep its site online with 18 servers, yet had less traffic (about 8x less, mind you) than a site I ran on 3 (which also had a forum like this). It's all about wasted resources, and most of it has to do with caching (or the lack of).

vBulletin (the maker of this forum) is well known for their heavily bloated scripts. Without aggressive caching, this forum script will take even a nice server down with only moderate traffic. On a forum with mostly visitors, there should be hardly any load on a well cached server since, unless the content changes, the 'resulting' text should be cached and no database hits should happen (less a few reporting hits, like post views).

With today's hardware, making a super-server costs much less than lost business from a "server too busy" message, but way more money than some decent time spent on software optimization. Being a web person by trade, that message should never be the default anyhow. A pretty, formatted "I'm sorry" personalized message pointing to the main store with some recommendations on where to fill the time while they wait should be #1 priority until that server comes online and some real time is spent on optimizing and caching.

All of that said, this is a nice forum and I'm glad it works out for all parties concerned, as iboats gets our businessand we learn from each other. That said, iboats would have a different reaction effort if members began displaying a "customer too disinterested" message half way through checkout. After all, this forum brings a massive amount of loyalty, something they would pay a LOT more for without it.