Hi,

Yes, I did order & add the 2nd processor.

-av

1. Does the main category page stop looking for unread posts in a particular category after it has found the first unread one, or does it find all of them in that category before moving on to the next category?


B. What about having users subscribe to the main forums (boards on general/regional/other) [and regions/countries/states/cities in the LDB] the way we subscribe to user forums? You only get read states on the areas you're subscribed to. A single person can't possibly keep track of or care about every single post on the site, so why not let a user pick and choose which areas to monitor for updates? Everyone could be subscribed by default to any site-wide updates or announcements. Have some kind of cap on subscriptions to prevent people from simply subscribing to everything, but premium members could subscribe to the whole site if they wanted to be difficult about it. Make the "New posts" page only display unread posts & threads in your chosen categories, and have a "most recent posts" page that simply grabs the most recent X number of posts so that a user can see what's going on site-wide without having to mark it all as read. Users could be automatically subscribed to individual threads they've replied to, no matter if they have a subscription to the containing forum.




edit: rogue emoticon removal

Posted by Avatar-X Hi, Yes, I did order & add the 2nd processor. -av

Boo. The Penguin used 333 and not 667. I'll dig through my memory pile, though. There may still be some 667 ecc in there somewhere!

http://uk.insight....oduct_id=KTEA04B4S

So that'd be about $70 for a further 2 Gig, which I'm sure would make a LOT of difference to UER.

Chris...

So friggen expensive... considering I paid like $200 for the 12gb of ram in my desktop computer.

That's why more and more companies are doing virtualisation of servers on standard desktop PCs. The advantage of a 'server' hardware platform is becoming less and less relevant every day, imho.

That said, compare the memory price I gave you with one from SUN and see if it's still expensive!

Chris...

Any thoughts on the subscription model as described above? I'd love to be able to ignore forums for the purposes of keeping my "new posts" page a bit more specific to the stuff I care about keeping updated on.

Classic ASP... brings back happy memories nightmares.

Actually, If anyone knows coldfusion around here, you are not too far off Well, minus the VBScript for CFScript which is a basterdized form of javascript.

I forgot to mention that the site is coded in ASP3, no .NET.

Why are you reluctant to upgrade when there are people offering you help?
Using webforms (.net) is soo much easier. Plus you can still use Visual Basic (although a lot of people don't reccommend). Finally, there is MVC Framework which is where everything is moving towards (and a lot faster than webforms).

I see some spare time in the future. If you want, I can rewrite the entire site in asp.net mvc 3, for free. Yes. for free (Well, maybe a beer would be also good

I appreciate the offer, but I'm not too keen on giving away the site's source code...

-av

Meh, I don't want to see the source code, but I do want to do some black box engineering ;)

This is a bit of thread necromancy, but what about a slightly different approach to the problem - split all of your read state tables into two, one for before the last update with a primary key in the index on the user ID, the other for everything since the last update run. When someone reads or views something write to the since the update table and update your counters as usual. You won't want to write random data into the old table all the time since the primary key might make the index updates slow. When you do your count update run you start by copying the recent updates into the main file,
then each user should go quickly since you've essentially told the DB to just row scan their data only (you'll want it all anyway). An occasional (frequency to be tuned later) optimize on the resulting table should take care of the rest but it won't get too bad since the updates are coming in chunked instead of random.

Probably discussing a long-solved problem here, but it still caught my interest.

Thanks -- I ended up 'solving' it by just getting rid of the readstates complexity.

-av