I upgraded the processor on the machine that runs all of dee-nee.com today. We went from a 266mhz Pentium II to a 600mhz Pentium III and I can defintiely notice the difference in the forums. Posting messages seems to be quite a bit quicker now and it cut the CPU utilization by 40%....
beautiful... the site had been lagging due to the amount of traffic.
welcome back gantry.
There are still some delays in bringing up posts, but all-in-all, the site has definitely become a bit faster.
that's what i have noticed... there are some lags but it is faster in other areas.
The speed is certainly acceptable for now and this will probably be the only upgrade for while. Other things I could do are the following: Warning - computer talk ahead:
1) Up the processor to a 1ghz Pentium III - This would be the easiest route to go but my motherboard is Slot1 and 1ghz P3 are pretty expensive.
2) Put a 256mb stick of RAM in there. We're at 160mb of RAM right now, but the memory utilization of the message boards is very low compared to the processor. So this probably isn't worth it...
3) Upgrade motherboard and processor - go with an 1.8ghz amd or something like that, but that'll run easily over $200 and I'm too cheap for that...
4) Convert the yabb (message board software) system from its current perl/flat-file database to the version that uses PHP and MySQL. A lot of people had huge speed gains after going that route, but that will be time consuming and probably put the board down for a little while. Something for the future if things get really bogged down...
Like I said though, for now everything is fine....
those sound great... i have no idea what they would do but they sound good regardless.