Active list - cron test.

[Brett_Tabke]

There is some testing going on this week with the active list. It will be updated only once every minute, then probably two. That means if you leave a post, it won't show on the active list for a few minutes.

I'm moving to statically generated content every minute there to tone down the server hit from massive page views on that script. During peak loads, 100-300 page views a minute to that script are not uncommon. I want to see if cron generated semi-static content will help.

[lorax]

statically generated content

Now that I'd like to see! :)

I think I know what you meant though. A static page, dynamically generated every few minutes? I would think that would reduce the load by some simply by reducing queries to the db. Wouldn't a cached query accomplish the same thing without the cron job?

[Sebastian]

Except that a cgi has a significant overhead and demand on a server compared to serving a simple static html page

[lorax]

Except that a cgi has a significant overhead...

Really? Even if just the result set is cached?

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, it would have to time test the cache. Otherwise, a much simplier script can be used that just pumps the page out.

Unfortunatly, none of this will work for the current system..

[sun818]

cgi has a significant overhead

Is BestBBS written in Perl? If it is optimized for Apache mod_perl that would help with the overhead yeah? Also, I notice the site is not as busy on the weekends, so the update would not have to be as frequent as say during mid-day?

[cminblues]

Only two little tips from my own experience:

1] The cron job, if cleanly written in Perl, started once [-> not started every minute/2minutes/etc], and with the correct use of 'FLOCK', I think may run without problems 2/3 times on a minute.
But this means a lot of disk read/write accesses [in a 'flat-files' scenario], and a bit complex script.
Much better a db cache querying solution.[-> In Apache 2.nn this works great]

2] Try to use 2 different h.d. [maybe you've already set this way :)]
- First for images-otherfiles and 'normal' content.
- Second for forum-updating files.
This will reduce a lot I/O latency times [-> often the real causes of server overloads].

cminblues

[Brett_Tabke]

What this is all about is allowing the board to go into a temporary 100% static page mode. That would help those rare but critical "mega peak" load scenarios. I thought I tackle the toughest problems first.