LL letting the forums die a slow death?

Anyone who has used the forums in the past few months has probably noticed that they alternate between performing ok and just grinding to a halt. The perfomance continues to worsen it seems. Many of the responses I have seen from Lindens about various things have indicated that the forums are just not a priority and they don't have the resources, so can we just expect at some point that the forums will just no longer work at all? They have made no secret of the fact that they do not like these forums, so perhaps they are just hoping people will stop using them if the performance gets bad enough? Certainly, the forum performance is not keeping up with the growth of SL.

At some point they'll probably have to cull the archive of old posts. I suspect the forum database is getting a bit too big to perform well anymore.

Well I think the forum performance is very much SL writ small lately...

Performance sucks, mods are a bad idea...let 'em close it!
All is good! We got SLUniverse!

I can't really say I've noticed much of a performance degradation of the forums over the last few months, other than those I've been attributing to slowness cause by griefers and general all-over-SL lag. Considering the odd dependence of the forums on the in-world servers though, it wouldn't be too surprising.


- Newfie

I don't know whether there's been a degradation in performance - but the forums clearly aren't operating awfully well, and do need working on. There are all sorts of annoying lags. Apart from anything else, it hardly looks good if a company that wants to promote its technical skills has a clunky vBulletin setup, does it?

No need to cull the old posts, just separate them, that is, they still exist, but aren't looked at during normal searches.

http://rankings.big-boards.com/

Big boards clearly shows that this isn't a problem for the vBulletin. I go to a forum with 2.5 million posts and nearly a hundred thousand threads with no real problems so it is something LL is or isn't doing that is making it slow.



It's better than phpBB and such. God do I hate to use almost any forum with phpBB. I will not even speak of the horrors of ezboard and what ever the hell its software is.

Yeah, I mod on another board using vBulletin which has many times the number of posts, users and views of this one, and it's not having problems.

And the search works, too.

So it isn't me? Half the time the forums or clicking on a thread just hangs forever, for me. Doesn't load.

I ran a phpBB for years and didn't have serious problems, but it was small.

I don't think LL is letting the forums die. I think the forums have slit their wrists, popped some cyanide tablets and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

I own a copy of VBulletin on another site and have problems with it there as well, and my traffic is but a mere iota of these forums. However, I don't blame it on VBulletin, I blame it totally on MySQL which is the worst nightmare of a database that anyone has ever excreted out of an orafice. Even Access is faster and more stable. Unfortunately, it's also the only thing VBulletin runs on. As a user product, I can't say enough about how much I love VBulletin. I also can't say enough about how much I hate MySQL.

I am 100% sure that any degradation in the performance of the SL forums is directly related to the decline of Taco Rubio posts.

I don't know a lot about it. I've just watched the same thing happen to the 3ds max support forum many times over the past several years and database bloat was always blamed, the forum was culled, and it would preform fine again for another six months or so. The point being that forums (at least ones I've participated in) tend to go through this sort of thing and it's not a sign of neglect.

I remember someone from LL saying the intermittant slowness is caused by people doing lots of big searches all at the same time. Takes me 10-45 seconds to load a thread every so often.

I am still rather annoyed that LL lost 500 of my posts a year or two ago along with so many others. As far as search slowing things down, vbulletin must have some not so good coding going on. Keyword searching is a bit tricky to get right in my experience, especially real time. But to have it bring down a web site's forums or have massive posts deleted? That is messed up.

I need to clarify that the loss of posts was from a Linden restoring the database and not noticing all the posts were missing. I don't remember who the Linden was. It doesn't matter now. The slow searches are a vbulletin issue. The missing posts was an LL thing.

Here is a post from Philip - 3rd post in July 2004 in the sluniverse forums. How things (haven't?) change(d). My last post in this thread, I promise.

I suspect it has something to do with new vBulletin versions and bloat. I checked some of the popular vBulletin forums in the forums ranking list, and the ones that still had the vBulletin footer intact seem to use v2 of their software. It probably has to do with some of the useless features they pack into new versions. Also, the SomethingAwful forums have a few servers and from what I remember, they keep their stylesheets and images on one server, main forums on another, search and archives on a third, and possibly more. I don't think LL can do much about this without hiring someone who knows how to optimize vBulletin, but either way you'll all bitch and blame them anyway

I just don't buy that it is a VBulletin problem since I have the latest version and my database is only 60MB. I have maybe 30 people on my forums at any given time. I get database error messages about MySQL at least every other day. In all honesty, I can't say enough about the VBulletin team as they went above and beyond the call of duty to get me converted and up and running. I frequent another forum that runs on VBulletin 3.5.3 (SL has version 3.0.3 and I have version 3.5.4) and their forum almost NEVER hangs despite 2000 concurrent users and Threads: 239,432, Posts: 942,797. I have attachments turned off on my forums and Threads: 5,580, Posts: 33,340 and I still get slow downs, hangs and database errors.