I've given up reporting on the issues they know they're there and happening frequently. It'll all be in the log files if they look.
Thanks for all the information which I have passed on to our hosts. They are going to move us to a newer server.
Based on their advice they would recommend capping the thread lengths to ~1000 postsAs far as I am aware there are only a handful of threads that are actually that long. I can only think of one in the 600 forum which is red98's stuttering thread. At the end of the day, software adjustments for a web forum aren't going to help that much when the traffic isn't that high.
Its more to do with where the data is stored on the hard drive (fragmentation)Lots of tiny pieces of data (each post for example) requires a different read request if its not stored exactly next to another piece being requested (which is unlikely). Therefore you need an HDD with a very amount of IOPS more than transfer rates. This is where RAID arrays and SSDs come in to increase performance and yield higher IOPS to the OS / ApplicationsIts worth noting that having all the avatars in a single directory isn't going to make any difference to data fragmentation unless I'm missing something.
It's just an interesting topic to discuss in a hypothetical world
Quote from: Dead Eye on 03 July 2013, 04:35:43 pm It's just an interesting topic to discuss in a hypothetical world No it isnt...its foccin borin. Yawn
If you think about it, information relating to the user is probably in one db table, then there is data about the post, the thread, avatars, logos, different scripts and includes, icons and so on. Its a big tollI don't think there is much that can be done to make the site faster since Farjo doesn't control the server and its setup - they rent hosting. It's just an interesting topic to discuss in a hypothetical world