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mneylon

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Tweaking MySQL is not that difficult but I think that to run a site as busy as boards.ie, it would require load balancing and replication.

Regards...jmcc
If you have a look over on WHT there's a few threads about their setup - which is truly impressive and never seems to go down
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
:)

Do you spend much on offline (traditional) advertising? If so, do you think online or offline offer a better return?
Offline works, but you have to work out which sorts of advertising and which publications will pay off ...
 

ConorP

New Member
If you have a look over on WHT there's a few threads about their setup - which is truly impressive and never seems to go down

I've seen it go down a few times with MySQL related problems. But then again Rackspace provide the hosting and they have a pretty decent repuation for doing some of that high end hosting stuff (It ain't cheap though)

Maybe it would be worth the 2 euro to see the accounts for Boards. I'd be curious to know what kind of money is going in/out
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I've seen it go down a few times with MySQL related problems. But then again Rackspace provide the hosting and they have a pretty decent repuation for doing some of that high end hosting stuff (It ain't cheap though)

You must spend more time on there than I do :)

I remember a thread about 2 and a half years ago when they were doing some migrations and updates. The figures they were throwing around were scary!
Maybe it would be worth the 2 euro to see the accounts for Boards. I'd be curious to know what kind of money is going in/out

I think you only get to see the abridged accounts which won't give you a full picture
 

Dan

New Member
Latest pain in the ass has been a dodgy RAID controller in our NAS server, which is what failed last night (again). We're going to replace that server soon.

If anyone actually worked at boards full-time, I think we'd be a little bit more reliable :)
 

Dan

New Member
Tweaking MySQL is not that difficult but I think that to run a site as busy as boards.ie, it would require load balancing and replication.

Regards...jmcc

Aye, its tweaked as much as it can be on a single box. 60% of our problems are currently due to problems with our NAS, and the other 40% are MySQL related - one will be fixed with a new server, the other with DB clustering.

The trouble is that every time we fix a problem, or add more capacity, we get exponentially more busy. To put that in context, when we added more webservers earlier this year, we started doing another 90,000-100,000 pages a day, within about two weeks. Capacity just doesn't last, and with this volume, any inefficiencies are brutally exposed (especially with my lousy code).
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I thought someone was working for boards fulltime?

Gerry gave me the impression when I met him down in Waterford that he would be working full time
 

Dan

New Member
No, no one at this stage. We're hoping to get more resources into boards very shortly, but right now, its still very much a part-time and when-we-can effort.
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Well if you get as much traffic as you say you do I can't understand why you can't make it a viable venture, or are you still hanging on to that fluffy "we're doing it for fun" attitude?
 

Dan

New Member
I think it is very much viable, and I'm sure the others agree. However, until very recently, we've all had committments that took precedence - boards came second.

I'm hoping that'll change soon =)
 

Cloud

New Member
(I had a nice big rant typed up to this thread but lost it last week. Now I feel sufficiently energised after the weekend to type most of what I can remember again...)

I think to say that boards.ie is offline nearly every day is a slight bit of an overstatement, don't you think - "dreams and reality", Dougal? True, boards.ie has been down three or four times in the past month to six weeks, mainly due to a dodgy RAID controller that we have identified on our attachments file share server, which we are currently getting a replacement for. Also, if Blogger can go down and Skype for a few days, maybe you can cut us a break - it happens to us all!

I don't think we've ever been that reticent about our income. Of course, you can go the CRO route to get more, but as Dan said, before now it was just for fun (and for the community); now we've moved from a "fluffy" fun community to an oft-quoted service, and it's due to that (and also because it is in the past year that we've begun to make enough money to actually hire someone full-time) that we need to look beyond our part-time input and get a body (possibly two people) to work for boards.ie full-time. Maybe that'll give a hint as to how much we are making ;)

We currently run on a load balancer, four web nodes, a file attachments / avatars server, and database backend (currently on one, but will be expanding to two DB nodes). Our other subsites (not linked to the boards.ie DB) run on a seperate "porked-up" server. As regards stats, have a look at my recent blog post showing the growth curve of boards.ie since we launched. boards.ie has 111350 registered users (38898 have been active in the last six months), and 6931221 posts on 596763 threads (85823 active in the last six months) in 671 forums. We do over 10 million page views a month, from 1.5 million visits. Average time on site is 15 minutes :)

...

The great thing about the Interweb is that there is this "law of the two eyeballs": if you don't like it, go look somewhere else. Most users of boards.ie are lurkers, non-registered accounts searching for information. I think they find it a very useful resource, and then you've got the people who actually post the information on that resource, many of whom get on fine with other users and moderators on the sites, and some of whom do not.

I am not sure of the exact stats of posters to readers for message boards (some stats say that only 0.16% of users post content to Web 2.0 sites, but it is easier to post to boards). Let's say that it's 10% who post as opposed to read, and then you've probably got 1 in 50 who have a beef with a moderator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdictator on the site - it's that small disgruntled number that you'll always hear from (when have you last heard good news on the TV - it's always the bad stuff you get). I am a case in point. I've never posted on here, but now that I've detected a bit of negative backstabbing going on, I've felt the urge to speak up and complain here rather than make some positive comment about how great this site is (although I must admit I only happen on here when there's a complaint about boards.ie, sorry). We do have a wonderful team of moderators, but of course power corrupts and amongst hundreds of people, a few can sometimes lose the plot. But I think the admins and super moderators try and be fair arbitrators in such cases. If you've a problem, just contact us.

So, to conclude, we're not actually offline every day, we're not perfect at moderating, we're not millionaires just yet, we're constantly trying to improve, and we're still growing almost exponentially. We've been providing a home for all types of Irish communities for nearly 10 years, and I hope we will continue to do so.

/me re-enters stealth mode
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I think to say that boards.ie is offline nearly every day is a slight bit of an overstatement, don't you think - "dreams and reality", Dougal? True, boards.ie has been down three or four times in the past month to six weeks, mainly due to a dodgy RAID controller that we have identified on our attachments file share server, which we are currently getting a replacement for. Also, if Blogger can go down and Skype for a few days, maybe you can cut us a break - it happens to us all!

It's been inaccessible more than 3 or 4 times in the last month.

Of course nobody is forcing anyone to use the site ...
 

Cloud

New Member
You obviously use the site more than I do then! Another statistic: in the past six months, we've had 1,003,559 posts.
 

jmcc

Active Member
The evolution of Boards.ie could make an excellent presentation for the Galway Barcamp Cloud. It could span the business/tech/social network fields and so have something for everyone.

Regards...jmcc
 
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