This forum will die!

I am working on improving the site performance, and as far as I can tell it has improved somewhat the last few months. Unfortunately I've had limited time the last couple months because I had to move (meaning, prior to that spending 2 months househunting). The move is finished, so I have time to spend time on V.

What I've been doing is studying database server performance, increasing its memory allocation, so that it has enough memory to run well. I also explored moving the site over to the Google Compute Engine infrastructure, and am exploring doing a site upgrade to Drupal 7. Either of those may help the site to run better, and moving to Drupal 7 will also let me make the site more friendly to use on mobile devices. I'd been hoping to instead move the site to Drupal 8 but the D8 development is taking too long and at this point it looks to be 2015 or beyond before that move could be done.

When I use the site it's not quite as bad as you're saying. On the other hand, the server performance tracking tool shows there's many times each day where server load shoots way up - and indicates that site activity is "bursty". In other words, it might be bad at 10:30 but be okay at 11:00 and then bad again at 11:30.

By the way - a little detail is that when you make a posting or comment and it gets to that "Page Not Found" message (that doesn't happen all the time) - the posting or comment is saved, but something timed out (and I haven't been able to figure out what) and ended up causing an error.

Making the site more friendly for mobile use can also be achieved by having it accessible via Tapatalk. Maybe an idea to think about?

Oh.. that's interesting, had never heard of that. Unfortunately the Tapatalk plugin for Drupal requires Drupal 7 - and V is on D6.

Generally speaking there's two ways to support a "mobile" device user with a website. One way is by creating a special "app" so they don't have to use the website, but use the app to interact with the data on the website. The second is to redesign the website so that it behaves correctly on a mobile web browser. There's two approaches to that - a) create a mobile-only version of the website, b) make the website design "responsive" so that it accommodates whatever browser the person is using.

I rather prefer the last approach.

For the D7 upgrade I tried the other night, I selected the "Zen Theme" because it is mobile-friendly from the get-go. There are some other mobile-friendly themes for Drupal, but I kinda need to familiarize myself with Zen for D7 because I am also the webmaster for plugincars.com and that site is built on the Zen theme, and also needs to be upgraded from Drupal 6.

I received the following message a few times tonight which I have not experienced before on this forum:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

I don’t know whether this information is helpful or not, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

Alan

As all things will "die" eventually, I have been wondering if it is possible to download the entire site and store it locally. You never know what you need, and if for example all the Vectrix info on VisforVoltage was lost due to whatever, we'd be dealing with doorstops pretty soon.

What I'd like is a program that automatically downloads an image of the form.

But then, maybe that's what's happening and slowing V down? Like rumors of a petrol shortage can cause panic buying and a realtemporary shortage, "bulk" downloading could make the site slow for everone else.

How big a disk would it need to store all of the publicly available VisforVoltage content at the moment?

well the forum seems to be running fine now, but the site will surely die if new members cant post

my first post has been waiting for mod approval for several days now

o wow, did my posts finally just show up now? 20 days later? >_<

I just tried to send an email to mods, it was denied. I have several admin-approved responses to existing threads, the messages never show up. I am not allowed to post a new thread. I have been on the forum since 2015, and cannot participate in any discussions. Help!

Hi, I didn't receive any email from you -- did you send something via the personal message feature?

Anyway, I just gave you enough "points" so you can post freely.