When will Egosoft get better forum servers?

[acrh2]

The lag is unbearable during peak hours. Takes minutes to open a single thread at times. Posts get duplicated, sometimes appearing up to an hour later. This is unacceptable.

[Cycrow]

when u pay for the bandwidth required to run the servers ?

[neverko]

Yeh, the forums are really slow in the afternoon/evenings (Euro time). With 200 people logged in it's slow, when there's 400+ it's unbearably slow, if it works at all. (All other pages I visit, load at lightspeed, so it's definitely these forums that are slow).

Some kind of upgrade would be nice

[Al]

Well upgrades cost money so I guess thats probably the biggest factor. Give them time and I'm sure things will get better. If nothing else the forum load will cut down once folks stop asking the same question in 5 threads on the first page

Al

[Chips]

Dunno about unacceptable, but it sure is annoying. Other forums cope with higher volumes of people...

Wonder if phpBB is just out of date? Wonder if the forum server has downloads hosted too... wonder a thousand things, but doubt we will ever know though.

[axetogrind]

Morrowind Forum had the same problem a while ago. It to do with the SQL backend. Until the updated they website they just limit the number of posts to 200 per thread.

The problem is where are they going to get money if everybody is returning the game

[Crypton]

might need to disable persitant connections in the sql db files. Had to do that with my old World of Warcraft site that was having around 2000 users on it at a time. The site has since be closed down do to the guild splitting up, but before I hard coded to not use persitant connections it was unbearable (it was hosted from HostRocket, before that, The Planet)

[marioman]

Is it just me or is the forum taking a REALLY LONG TIME to do anything? lol It just took me 1hr of trying to even get into the forums.

[shadowfawx]

When you have the majority of your fan base posting rants and technical support questions due to the fact that you have released a partial product this seems to become rather common.


I guess we'll have to wait for patch 1.4 to fix the forum as well?

[GHarper]

anybody still got a pic of the old server? ah the good ole days...

g

[chadrickb]

Well upgrades cost money so I guess thats probably the biggest factor. Give them time and I'm sure things will get better. If nothing else the forum load will cut down once folks stop asking the same question in 5 threads on the first page

Al

The same five posts on the first page is a little extreme...but I wonder what percentage of posts are duplicates and how many would not exist with the search function enabled. Right now there are a total 480448 posts in the General forum. Would having half that number of posts speed things up compared to the loss of performance from enabling searching? I'm guessing it wouldn't, but it would still be nice not having so many repeated posts

[stevecs]

I don't know if Egosoft is hosting this themselves or not but whomever can put some bandwidth quality of service in place. I would think if they look at the utilization by protocol it's probably something like the downloads that are killing it. Just switch those to ftp from http and then give http higher priority, so the downloads take a little longer but since they are not interactive like the forums it will help user experiences. Just a couple $0.02 here.

[BurnIt!]

I am sorry to tell you that your observation is not correct.
It is definetely not the bandwidth that is our problem.
And it's not the database either - we've got plenty of reserves there since the last upgrade.

We know what the problem is and we are dealing with it.

See here

[stevecs]

I am sorry to tell you that your observation is not correct.
It is definetely not the bandwidth that is our problem.
And it's not the database either - we've got plenty of reserves there since the last upgrade.

We know what the problem is and we are dealing with it.

See here

Oh so it's the front-end web servers themselves that are being nailed or is it the php 'middle layer' that's sucking up the cycles? Just curious, I've hosted a lot of large-bandwidth sites but most of those usually bottleneck either in the db layer or in raw bandwidth (media streaming). Most of the front-end servers we put together generally have the horsepower (with plenty to spare) for the users. (generally we use sun servers but in my experience it's the number of cpu's and static page cache that really helps for just web serving). Haven't really run anything large (or medium) w/ php so any observations would be nice to see.

[Jericho]

I a month's time, once all the hype has died down, the volume of traffic will die down. It always does. Same for any game. No point in buying new hardware or software just to deal with 2 months of heavy use every 3 years.

[Chips]

I originally wanted to edit my post to say "I wonder if it's intentionally caused to stop moaners posting" - but sadly, and quite poetically... the forum was too busy to post it

[Jericho]

I guess Allanis Morrisette left that one out of "Ironic"

[LeeE]

I don't know if it's just me but i have noticed the forums being a lot faster today, no hanging or page cannot be displayed screens yet...

[BurnIt!]

It's the "middle layer" as you describe it. The dynamic webpages that have to be parsed by PHP put an enormous strain on the CPU.

In other words: without PHP (or similar dynamic content systems) one server could handle the users and traffic we have (well at least until the demo is available). But without PHP there would be no forum either. So we're facing server number 4 now.

[Jericho]

So we're facing server number 4 now.

Is that the server with the hard-drives nailed to the wall, and the mobo just sitting on a table, and the PSU dangerously hanging around with wires everywhere? Was it you that used to have that picture?