As I'm fully aware of some recent performance issues, please rest assured that I'm working always to help speed the site up more and more.
The recent major improvement was with the forum search results... which gave an increase of approx 900%.
I have tonight made similar changes to the profiles search pages (Full search and quick search). Searches are now an average of 316% faster, and it's more noticeable where searching over larger areas. Searches are also cached now, so if someone makes the same search just before you - it will remember the results and give you an instant results page.
Searching never used to be an issue, but as the site has grown so rapidly there has been an ever-more increasing demand on the server resources (i.e Processor, memory, hard drive bandwidth, etc).
Let me know what you think, and if you have any issues please don't hesitate to shout up.
If you've no idea what this is all about - don't worry about it, just continue using the site lol
PML Matt it works nearly every time...when you post a technical item someone cracks a funny.
It got me giggling, they're a right pair of loonies
The site is deffo quicker than it was a short while ago, ta Matt.
I know you're good with figures (numerical ones!) but that percentage is a precise one, nope don't explain it or I'll have to knit meself another 'blonde' wig.
i run 100 random searches, completely random, then took the results and figured out the increase in performance. 3.16x faster it was (Come to think of it, is 3.16x faster the same as 316% faster? It's not is it, dammit).
Anyhow - what i forgot to say was that working on the forum searches and the profile searches wasnt just to speed them sections up, it was to free up server resources for all the other pages. For example, if 10 people were running large profile searches in the past it would have a massive knock-on effect if you wanted to view your PMs etc. The whole site should start to get faster and faster the more i change things, but no promises or guarentees about 100% uptime just yet :-)
We i gotta say that the site has been running SOOOOO fast since i made all the changes. There's been no slow-running performance problems at all (Not that i'm aware of).