Test post. If this works, the news system is up and running.

Yes, seems to be working.

[The text of this article has been removed by a news editor due to violation of the acceptable use policy.]

Ticalc.org does load much faster now. I didn't think it would make that big of a difference. Good job guys!

Yeah I agree, the server is much faster now. I have brodband and even I can notice the difference.

Wow. Much faster. I have a 56k and this is a very very nice improvement. Although I'll be getting cable really soon.

A WHOLE LOT faster.....I have a dialup connection too, so this is very good-no more waiting 30 seconds for the front page to load....

Much of this is probably because we have now enabled "mod_gzip". This means that all HTML that leaves our server is compressed if the browser supports this (which most modern browsers do). This should make a significant difference for dialup users, since many pages can be compressed very much.

Wow. What other behind the scenes things went on? Are posts posted instantly now?

Nope

Why is it that the posts take up to 5 minutes to appear? Other boards like phpbb update instantly, so it is possible.

-W-

The posts go to a database, which is compiled into HTML every 5 mins, AFAIK. That way the database doesn't have to be parsed each time a page is served up like phpBB.

-MrM

Wha tare the advantages to this?

-W-

The server doesn't get overloaded!

If you recompile the page EVERY TIME THE PAGE GETS A HIT, enough hits will kill the server, but if you compile it to HTML every 5 mins (and only when there has been a post since last recompile), it'll never (in theory) get overloaded.

Personally, I think, instead of 5 mins, it should be every post, but that's just my opinion

-MrM

I was thinking the same thing too...
"Personally, I think, instead of 5 mins, it should be every post, but that's just my opinion"

Wow has anyone noticed that these comment boxes are getting really small? (ok thats off topic but whatever)

It lets us deliver 400,000 requests per day off a 200MHz machine... (Ok, not all those 400,000 are for news articles, but we have capacity to spare when it comes to CPU speed)

Hmm...that makes a lot of sense. I used to think that the delay was just the server processing the requests and recompiling the page offline, then replacing the old page with the new when it had finished recompiling.

WOW, that would be one damn slow server.

-W-

No, that doesn't take that long. (It takes too long to do on every request, though, so we need to pre-process and cache it. Otherwise, we'd need a much larger server)

Ticalc is moving way to slow. News articles come like once a month and my programs took a month to post.

Yeah... the PERL could just write directly to the page instead of waiting every 5 minutes for a page reload. That seems to me, like it would be easier. But then again, these guys know what they're doing, so there must be a good reason.

Probably the most direct problem with that is concurrency. What if another comment is posted whlie the page is still being written? That's the kind of things the db will solve for you.

That said, we might be able to cut down on the time delay. But we have a few more things that need to be fixed first.

Oh, right... good point. :) That would probably mess up the HTML of the page a lot, and that wouldn't be good.

Make the posts faster would help us to cheack and correct our wording and meaning. Please consider speeding up the posts.

Oops! Making and check.
See my point!

You're tellin' me! A news article with about 50 comments used to take about 20 seconds to load, but now it only takes two!

MWM

It's pretty much instantanious for me, which is a BIG improvement. I would have to wait up to five minutes, somtimes, just to post something. :'( Now, this is a lot faster. The server downtime was REALLY worth it!

The big pages still take forever (like the 83+ basic misc page)

That's not going to change, because of the sheer volume of data in that page. BTW, I think TICalc.org should organize some sort of contest to determine a system for breaking up the misc folders and game folders a bit. What sayest thou?

Contest? Contest how? I really don't understand your question!!!

-So sayeth ME, W-

break them down into more specific categories, i suppose, like for games you could have action, rpg, puzzles, etc. and for misc you could have word processors, timers, counters, etc.

Or Ticalc.org could just delete all of the stupid BASIC programs. In that case, there wouldn't be enough left to make it worth sorting them

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Sounds like a good new server' but what happened to the pics for the new uploads and statistics.
Surely with your new server you could allow more space for gif's?
As for the statistics, wtf?
Maybe you should re-design the statistics system from scratch....
Because a live system would be much better....
...or will this just go to the endless pile of "things someone else can do" list?
ne?
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Smart one...if you would have read the other comments pages, you would have seen that they _are_ redoing the stats system.

Yer, i've got the time to read a 7 page topic, not really!

WOW! The speed of the site increased SO much! WOW! Great job! And, I never noticed it being down! That was strange. I've been SO busy lately. Anyway, this is great! No more annoying lagtime! Yay!

Out of curiosity, I thought that my comment was deleted (btw, why?), not the article. :-D

So is it still counting downloads and just not figuring out the ranking, or is it not recording anything?

Stats are frozen at the moment. Hmmm, part of me wonders if we should bring them back, sure would cut back on the endless quadratic programs being uploaded. :-)

lol

Do any of you really know what you are talking about? I haven't yet noticed a difference in the speed of the site. It shouldn't go up that much unless they upgraded their connection for the server. What are the proccessing chips? Itaniums or Xeons? (Or pentiums... unless you went with AMD in which case I would never visit the site again =P JK.) Anyway, How much and what kind of RAM does the server have.

thats good news