Temporarily Starving the Faeries

[mtrax]

I hope its not someone polling the website for data continuously

[ideology]

the gold medal goes to http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/Sc00t.rss which is being viewed on average 435 times per day (that's once every 3.3 minutes.) the results are cached, but it still chews up resources.

a big hit appears to be yahoo and other crawlers. they generate five times the traffic of real users. (yep, you read that right: five times!) hence we have temporarily disabled all web crawlers/search engines. interestingly this has not cause as big an improvement as we thought it would. more research required.

the only major single thing left that could be causing the problem is the forum software, which is quite old, so we are setting up a way for it to be upgraded

[mtrax]

Good work, perhaps the robots may take some time to get the message.
and perhaps you should email Sc00t with a nice medal.. saying once a day is enough ..

I assume you are analysing the logs to get this info,
do you have any network sniffers ?

I have a PhpBB V2 , not quiet go around to upgrading... I guess since you have some integration that may be tricky..

[caughtatwork]

Good work, perhaps the robots may take some time to get the message.
and perhaps you should email Sc00t with a nice medal.. saying once a day is enough ..

I assume you are analysing the logs to get this info,
do you have any network sniffers ?

I have a PhpBB V2 , not quiet go around to upgrading... I guess since you have some integration that may be tricky..

phpBB is up to 3.0.2 which is probably where we'll go unless someone wants to give up some cash for vBulletin

[Bewilderbeest]

phpBB is up to 3.0.2 which is probably where we'll go unless someone wants to give up some cash for vBulletin

No worries...I'm assuming this bit https://www.vbulletin.com/order/ that says $180 is what you're referring to? Or am I missing something?

As a regular user of the forum and stats features of GCA, I'd be happy to make a one-off contribution of $180. Im sure we could fundraise to cover the cost of future upgrades.

PM me if you're serious about this.

[caughtatwork]

Yes, for vBulletin it would be $180 plus I think $60 per year.

vBulletin is a more robust than phpBB, but that's not necessarily the final decision yet.

At the moment I'm looking into what needs to be done to convert phpBB 2.0.x to phpBB 3.0 while retaining all of the hacks we've applied.

It's not a simple activity, so I'll be a while on this.

Thank you for your offer(s) of cash (even via PM), but we'll hang on just for the moment. It might be best offered to the new server rather than the forum software.

[SUBYDAZZ]

Any idea when the feeds will be turned back on? And then how long we can expect it to take to update all the recent finds?

Just expecting a milestone soon and it's hard to keep track with it down

[ideology]

we've just turned the feed back on
it may take a week or so for your caches and logs to ripple through

we monitored the performance of the server while the feeds were down and it didn't really change. the big change in performance was when we disabled the search engines from crawling the sites (mainly geocaching.com.au and wiki.geocaching.com.au)