Wonder if it's a difference in location or connection type. The opposite is true for me. Monday through Wednesday, the site was slow, but I made a lot of changes Wednesday that resulted in it finally needing far less than 100% of the horsepower just to keep up. Though traffic remained the same on Friday, utilization stayed between 30% and 50% all day.
Live Chat is something I'd ditch in an instant if the users would let me. The Live Chat link takes you to another site that has offered to host live chat for us. The only thing it has to do with iHub is that the menu has a link to it.
Personally, if I wanted to live chat with people, I'd use IRC. Not sure what made someone want to reinvent that particular wheel when the existing wheel was a nice chrome-plated spoke wheel that's free, and the best they could do was an old wooden wagon wheel with a bent rim, half the spokes missing, and charge sites a ridiculous amount of money for using that wheel. When I came on board and found out what we were paying for it, my response was "Not anymore", and Matt found someone willing to let us redirect our chat traffic to them.
Could be slow because of the extra memory it takes to keep all those charts in the posts.
Nope. Actually, the whole database can fit almost 3 times into the database server's memory. The cache is working great. When I went up there Tuesday just to make sure the hard drives weren't getting beat to death, I watched the database server for about 30 seconds before I finally saw a brief flicker of the hard drive light. Had my daughter put her ear against both machines for about 15 seconds each and she never heard hard drives chattering. Although she nearly freaked out Daddy because she had her shoulder resting against the database server's on/off button. <g>
The URLs to the charts and sounds are kept in the posts. We don't store the charts and sounds themselves. If we did, that'd definitely use up a bunch of memory.
My estimate right now is that given the current memory and CPU utilization, it would take roughly 3 times as much traffic as we currently have (or 6-7k posts per day) to start slowing things down to the level they were Monday-Wednesday. And when I'm finished with the current batch of tweaks, I expect the capacity before slowdown to be right around 10k posts per day. We definitely have some time before we need to either add machines or replace the existing ones with multi-CPU Athlons with several gig of memory each. |
