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Post by FrozenEmu on Sept 18, 2003 16:43:05 GMT -5
Hi everybody..
I set up this forum to make it eaiser for people to post info they know about how to cut down the bandwidth costs of pixelation, or just to post some random stuff while you wait for the real board to come back up. Forgive the uglyness/ads, but I guess I'm getting what I'm paying for with this one. heh. You need not register to post, and of course it goes without saying, this place will be abandoned when the real board comes back up.
Anyway, some ideas I've gotten already: - GZip compression. As it turns out, this was OFF for some reason. That alone should help, in theory. - Remove the "notify by e-mail" feature. I'm not sure how much this is taking up, but does anybody use it? - Cut down on the number of extranious tables and codes in the template files for the board. Something we do kinda need to do here.. subsilver is a nice template, but it's kinda heavy for a high-volume board like pixelation. Anybody know of any "lite" templates for phpbb? Most I've seen seem to be modifications of subsilver. - Split the css info out into a seperate file. No idea why I didn't do this already. heh - Switch to a more bandwidth-sensitive board script. I've gotten info about minibbs (http://www.minibbs.com) as well as a couple offers to write custom scripts for it. I'd rather stick with PhpBB, I think, since the mySQL database system is nice and easy to back up and store, and all of the archives/user data is already in the right format, but if anybody has any other ideas along these lines, let us know.
Thanks to everybody who's already made suggestions to me via e-mail. We'll try to get the board back up as soon as we can, no later than the begining of next month by any means.
- FrozenEmu
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Post by xanthier on Sept 18, 2003 17:56:35 GMT -5
Your my hero man, more power to you
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Post by Trowa on Sept 18, 2003 18:56:29 GMT -5
yep the css thing will help a lot, as will the cutting out of email notifications, which tend to be huge bandwidth eaters.
hopefully everyone will keep posting somekind of general community thing over here on this thread.
Just as a suggestion, would it help if maybe some of the members of the board with thier own webspace hosted some of the graphics that make up the site. reserving say 1gb per month for a couple of menu buttons or summit?? if you get 10 or so members doing it then you'd have 10gb or so extra bandwidth to play with... just a suggestion
[quoth Xanthier] Your my hero man, more power to you [/quoth]
I second that...
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Post by BjornCSP on Sept 18, 2003 19:04:50 GMT -5
dude,
This happenes a lot lately ...
we love the initiative of pixelation and i must say it has helped us out in the past.
perhaps i could hook you up with a server for free , you got my msn , contact me some time.......
Rgrds,
Bjorn Janse CSP-Mobile
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Post by BjornCSP on Sept 18, 2003 19:07:36 GMT -5
dude, This happenes a lot lately ... we love the initiative of pixelation and i must say it has helped us out in the past. perhaps i could hook you up with a server for free , you got my msn , contact me some time....... Rgrds, Bjorn Janse CSP-Mobile Soz , no edit button , but just wanted to mention we can also help out with the Recoding to CSS/PHP etc etc.
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Post by orangerobot on Sept 18, 2003 19:50:58 GMT -5
What are the average monthly bandwidth requirements of Pixelation?
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Post by lloyd on Sept 18, 2003 20:00:16 GMT -5
Consider wiping all the registered users who have not posted. The scripts query the user table a whole bunch of times on almost every action.
Also there's lots of extraneous querying all the time in almost all the scripts.
Particularly you must trim the index, viewtopic and viewforum scripts. remove anything you don't currently, or ever will use.
I.e. replace the {L_BLAHBLAH} with hardcoded English in the templates for index, viewforum and viewtopic, and anywhere else where you can.
I'll check out what I've done for 2DNow and see if there's some good tricks to be found.
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Post by Dark Phoenix on Sept 18, 2003 20:07:00 GMT -5
Well, if you want my opinion, you should use Invision Board.
I've used Ikonboard (both 2 and 3), YaBB, PHPBB2, IBF and vBulletin in my web career, and IBF IS the best board software I've seen.
And it isn't much harder to do an IBF skin than it is to to a PHPBB2 skin.
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Post by Xiaou2 on Sept 18, 2003 20:10:51 GMT -5
Hello all, I was refered here by a friend. Unfortunately, the site went down before I could really explore it : ( Im looking for pixel artists to help with a Marble Madness remake project. You can see some of shots here: www.xiaou2.homestead.com/mnews.html (Ill be updating the site soon... Ive been busy, then got sick ): The game is fully playable. Has many new features and creatures. However... we need tilework done for the new levels... and maybe some animations as well. If anyone with the time / skills are interested, Please mail me: stevelundquist@yahoo.com with "marble" in the subject... and a few choice samples of your works rar'd or zipped up. My ID for Aim, Ypager, MSN are all "xiaou2" Thanks for your time. I think true pixelers will make this game really incredible. Sincerely, Steve
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Post by bedelf on Sept 18, 2003 20:30:37 GMT -5
Quote: "- Remove the "notify by e-mail" feature. I'm not sure how much this is taking up, but does anybody use it?" Pixelation is a very large board and I use this almost exclusively to track threads, most of the time I wish there was a button to track threads I haven't replyed to. Alot of forum software tracks thread status per account, so you can see any change without email notification. On pixelation, if I view a thread, it greys out, and thats the last I see aside from it bumping up to the top. They also have nice "mark as all read" buttons and whatnot. If it's between email notification and pixelation not coming back, then it has to go. I just hope not.
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Post by Lloyd on Sept 18, 2003 20:32:53 GMT -5
Oh, yeah, the search feature. Whenever a post is made, it creates "search words", and this particular table ought to be MASSIVE on your board. Disable searching for non-registered members.
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Post by Nemesis42 on Sept 18, 2003 21:03:24 GMT -5
Kill the archives sections. They're almost gone anyway... but they were pointless.
...maybe... just a complete start-from-scratch? I havn't gotten that minibbs loading for me yet, but that may be a good option... Pixelation's appearance wasn't particularly complicated.
There were maybe a hundred people who posted once or twice and dissapeared, certainly taking up server time... it would be a good idea maybe to remove a user who hasn't posetd in a month if his post count is under 10, or something... that would kill two birds with one stone, since it would remove those millions of people who signed up but never posted.
Also... this is maybe a dangerous solution... make a backup, and then remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace? It would greatly reduce bandwidth (10% perhaps?) depending on the code... and if something needed to be changed, you go from the backup. Of course, this type of thing is a coders worst nightmare... but if you're careful with the backups it should be fine.
Also, unneccessary options could be completely coded out... such as the "smilies are thankfully off" crap... everyone knows that and we don't need to be reminded, heh.
That's all I can think of at the moment... these are really scraping stuff together for every scrap of bandwidth you have... but being anal does have advantages. if I come up with more ideas, I'll post them...
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Post by Xan Barefoot on Sept 18, 2003 21:14:13 GMT -5
Quote: "- Remove the "notify by e-mail" feature. I'm not sure how much this is taking up, but does anybody use it?" Pixelation is a very large board and I use this almost exclusively to track threads, most of the time I wish there was a button to track threads I haven't replyed to. Alot of forum software tracks thread status per account, so you can see any change without email notification. On pixelation, if I view a thread, it greys out, and thats the last I see aside from it bumping up to the top. They also have nice "mark as all read" buttons and whatnot. Some forums have threads you've posted to on your profile, from 1 day ago, 1 week ago, 1 mo ago etc. doesn't have to be that long, but maybe that would be more efficient, my inbox fills up with that notify by e-mail every time someone posts and i forget about it, personally i dislike it, the only time I'd like to know when someones posted is when it's my thread, but you usually know where to find those pretty easily, anyway I think there could be alternative to the NBE feature. my 2 cents, and maybe a half ^_^
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Post by Xandaman on Sept 18, 2003 21:22:43 GMT -5
Nem suggested kill the archives, or perhaps someone could volunteer webspace exclusively to old archived pixel art, it alone can't be too much especially when it never has to function as a mess board, I supposed it could be updated. And about non-active members, some people join post their want- ad for pixel artists and then disappear never to be seen again, they hardly need their accounts so I second the idea of eliminating long dead members....there bodies are probably beginning to stink by now neway, bury them. On another note My brother Introduced me to some anime and we watched Samurai X the other night and it kicked ass, does anyone watch the Kenshin series?
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Post by Nemesis42 on Sept 18, 2003 21:36:39 GMT -5
<offtopic>I don't watch Kenshin... but Naruto ownz all.</offtopic>
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