Update: article.php pages are now being partially cached as well, be on the look out for errors on those pages please!
Yes, I'm well aware that the site is up as often as my dead grandmother completes a marathon. Because GameSpy probably has better things to do than to tend to the likes of me, I am once again trying to optimize the site.[break="what's the plan and what should I look for?"]Let me go totally nerd on your ass. When another site was given access to the database daemon on this server, the database has been overloaded. I noticed the slowdowns and proceeded to more than half the amount of database queries sent by our code. The updates really didn't do much; the problem is with securing a connection to the DB daemon, not the interaction with it. GameSpy has promised CS-Nation a separate server, but this does not benefit them at all so I am not going to rush them any further.
So--since optimizations haven't helped at all--it has become very apparent that caching is the only way to solve this problem. Caching saves dynamic content to a static file on the web server, thus eliminating the need to even connect to the database server (thereby making less connections so the places that actually need connections work more often). This probably won't help the situation either as so many of our hits come to the main page and there are too many variables to cache and continue to use our previously useful codebase.
Right now the following items are being cached: the right hand sidebar on every page except the main page, every /view.php/ page, POTD pages, SOTD pages, and image.php?id= pages. If you notice something wrong with any of these items, e-mail me with a full description and possibly a screenshot.
Please understand that caching is not easy to just program in and will probably take more than one night to absolutely perfect. I realize your frustration with visiting the site and I'm sure it is helping our strong competition, but this is something that I cannot really control. I have been trying to address this for a long time and everything I try seems to have no effect.
I should be playing Splinter Cell, Tekken 4, or even Vice City. Instead I'm coding for a dumb website. And you're frustrated?!
Yes, I'm well aware that the site is up as often as my dead grandmother completes a marathon. Because GameSpy probably has better things to do than to tend to the likes of me, I am once again trying to optimize the site.[break="what's the plan and what should I look for?"]Let me go totally nerd on your ass. When another site was given access to the database daemon on this server, the database has been overloaded. I noticed the slowdowns and proceeded to more than half the amount of database queries sent by our code. The updates really didn't do much; the problem is with securing a connection to the DB daemon, not the interaction with it. GameSpy has promised CS-Nation a separate server, but this does not benefit them at all so I am not going to rush them any further.
So--since optimizations haven't helped at all--it has become very apparent that caching is the only way to solve this problem. Caching saves dynamic content to a static file on the web server, thus eliminating the need to even connect to the database server (thereby making less connections so the places that actually need connections work more often). This probably won't help the situation either as so many of our hits come to the main page and there are too many variables to cache and continue to use our previously useful codebase.
Right now the following items are being cached: the right hand sidebar on every page except the main page, every /view.php/ page, POTD pages, SOTD pages, and image.php?id= pages. If you notice something wrong with any of these items, e-mail me with a full description and possibly a screenshot.
Please understand that caching is not easy to just program in and will probably take more than one night to absolutely perfect. I realize your frustration with visiting the site and I'm sure it is helping our strong competition, but this is something that I cannot really control. I have been trying to address this for a long time and everything I try seems to have no effect.
I should be playing Splinter Cell, Tekken 4, or even Vice City. Instead I'm coding for a dumb website. And you're frustrated?!
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