How were things during the game, like the chat and site performance?

[Tony (admin)]

I didn’t manage to jump into chat, but I can see there was a chat so that apparently worked. How was chat and how was the site performance? Big road games tend to be a little more demanding on the site, so perhaps this Saturday will be a better test. Thanks for the input.

[fosternano]

Website/ app loaded much faster than normal. I was able to see all the posts fairly quick, normally with all the activity it would take 5+ minutes to load in the past. Not this time.

[chinngiskhaan]

In previous years, I have been, at times, unable to load the chat or the website on my computer. Even when kind of working it would take several minutes to load and was often sluggish once loaded.

This time around I don’t recall having any such issues. MUCH BETTER. Great work Tony!

[Larry B]

Chat loaded much faster than normal. Are you keeping the current layout of the site permanently? Personally I liked the old layout better.

[Tony (admin)]

I’m glad to hear it worked well this past week. This week on the road at Baylor will be probably a better test since 99.9% of us will be at home/online and not at the game.

@larryb I like the threaded view the best too. So many nice features. I spent 100’s of hours working on it too. The catch with that is there’s SOOOO much more data to load and process. All of that other data like replies, likes, etc has to be queried from the database and then displayed on the front end and it more than maxes out the server during busy times. The “game mode” version only has to load and display the titles and basics of 10 posts. I even reduced the threaded view down to only 5 topics from 10, but if a topic becomes popular with lots of replies the same issue happens.

For some time I’ve been working on a new version of the home page. I paused that work for awhile but I’m back to experimenting with it. It is sort of a combination of the two views. It looks and acts more like the threaded, but only loads the threads when you click on a topic. I’m afraid there’s no getting around that flow for performance, unless I spend megabucks on “scalable” hosting from AWS or something. That could literally cost thousands a month and the site doesn’t bring in near enough to pay for that with once a year fundraisers.

There are some nice advantages to the forum view: Obviously quick loading is the main one, but it shows the most recent topic activity instead of a straight incremental display of posts. So popular posts stay at the top. You can also click right on the time/date of the most recent post and it will take you right to that place in the thread so you can read just the newest stuff. You can also click the forum or the author to go right to them.

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