You, know, i know it. We all see it from time to time. yes i am talking about the "Server is too busy to handle your requests" screen. And to tell you the truth i am getting sick and tired of it.

Main reason:
When i wanna provide some help in the hardware hangout, i can't because "the server is too busy to handle your requests." this gets tiresome, i am seeing more and more subscribers everyday ( or is it just me ) I seem to be getting this error more often as of late. WHY? i don't know, maybe it's just me thinking that or it really is getting bogged down more and more often, I know neowin wants to grow and this community is the best on the internet.

So I'm thinking.. ( and bear with me here) either lockdown the forums to only registered members. (this i dont myself wholeheartedly agree with but i figure what the hay )


OR: can we donate some more funds to help remedy this? I know Neowin uses a boatsized load of bandwidth per month and on Sundays i know that, that is "Backup day"

I personally wouldn't mind at all to help in donating more funds to do my part in getting rid of this problem.

what do you guys think?

Lockdown the forums for only registered members? or donate extra to help
I go with the second choice.

What about if there was another type of subscriber group where they pay X of amount money a month or year and they get put on a different server to the current main ones, the "subscriber server" and the money the subscriber pays goes to maintaining the "subscriber server" ? and therefore subscribers won't have to deal with server busy messages as they are on a totally different server.

thats the last thing neowin needs. to divide its content amongst subscribed and unsubscribed members.

what about getting a donation account setup, and upgrade to a hell of a lot better server..

(cough timdorr)

Just add another server, seeing how neowin already have 2 http servers i think, just put a 3rd in for subscribers, and they use the same database server


http://www.neowin.net/aboutus.php

I didn't know about the donate button, cool

Edit : I've just donate 10 euros. Every little helps.

Me neither

k well an upgraded server should be looked into.

as ive suggested in the past let people donate a small sum of money, for those who cannot afford the 13 dollars, have a donater tag or something similar to the subcsriber tag. i appreciate the admins for not litering neowin with outrageous ads, but i think the only way to free up the server usage is to slender down, more so, the forums for non registered members. i understand that sigs and such are disabled but maybe going a step furter. maybe another version of neowin will be less forum-like, for non members, and more similar to a news site. i dont know if this can be done with IVB but know it can be accomplished with vbulletin, but i know neowin is proud of its accomplishment of being the largest IVB on the net so i doubt they would do such a thing.

Upgraded from the 3 we already have?

It's not the hardware of the server, they jsut upgraded hardware not too long ago. and added another, It's the bandwidth thats slowing neowin down. I think uploading images should be a no no, maybe that will help. with site like imageshack.us, imagebarrel.com and theres more and more popping up everyday theres no reason to upload images and add to the congestion.

Mon3y doesnt grow on trees

just one server is only 250-300 dollars a month (and they have 3).

is that directed at me?

Just another point to my other little point, just say theres a seperate group where you pay $5 a month to be put on a seperate server. There would be atleast 50 people out of the 91,648 registered members that would do that (including me), thats already $250 a month. And also that server wont have to be pimped out.

You can throw 50 servers at the problem, won't mean a thing if there is a bottleneck connection side. It's all about badnwidth.

I agree with rip on this: as much as the images allow everyone's individuality to be expressed, I'd rather bann sig images, etc., to make the most efficient use of the hardware and bandwidth the site has.

Surely bandwidth has nothing to do with serverload

And you could have 50 servers all load balanced to distribute the load efficiently, each having their own connection.

It's members like this that slow down neowin
I';m not talking about banning sigs, since there hotlinked unlike avatars that can be uploaded im talking about pics, uploading them need to be stopped or something

Sigs are off site though. So that wouldn't matter. Some avatars however are on site.

As well as attached images. Like mine ^. /me Hypocrite.

maybe forcing all unregistered users to use the lite skin (or one with less images) when browsing the forum.

Less images = less hits = les server strain and bandwidth used

I PM'ed that guy and told him that its his fault that neowin is falling to peices.

V.V. Funny Mr Baker

Let's start blaming people for Neowin's supposed slowness

Your high post count would increase the size of the database more than his hotlinking to images on other servers



By the way, I have not seen a server is busy error in well over 6 months now.

If you wouldve posted in this thread at the time that pic was originally posted you would've seen taht it was earth sized. I wasnt attacking him i was pointing the fact out tha huge images contribute in slowing neowin down, Hes resized and hotlinked


And just because you haven't got the message doesn't mean that i haven't

I always assumed most images are hosted offsite, apart from some avatars...

I will have to take a closer look at IPB to see if you can force unregistered users to view the 'Lite' version.

But does anyone know whats causing the problem, bandwidth, or the internals of the Servers ?

Concidering that you are seeing the 'Server load is too High' message or what ever it is, then its the server. If it was the bandwidth then you wouldn't see anything.

I have seen the messages too.

As far as I know, the "Server to buys messages" is related to the MySQL database. Which if I am correct is hosted on a different server aside from mail and images and HTML.

Please don't flame....but I did hear rumors at one point that some big sites switching to using vbulletin forums because of the server issues.

Don't know if thats true?

My personal opinion is to do away with all uploads to the neowin servers and make everything be hotlinked.

Honestly because I am a subscriber and do support neowin I keep the ad server adblocked by firefox and I almost never get server errors. Don't know if that is related or not?

Actually thats one of the reasons why we switched from VB to IPB back in 1.0 and 1.1

Don't know how IPB 2.0 holds up when compared to VB 3.0, but I'm sure its still better. The servers would come to a hault completely when VB was on here.

Actually I did know that NW switched from VB to IPB a long time ago. I just wonder what the comparisons are between IPB 2 and VB 3 in terms of server relibility?

True... it'd be an interesting thing to see.

Much agreed. Hotlink everything and reduce the size of any posted images/elimate entirely

you think WinHEC had anything to do with it?

Just a little note on the subject of sigs and Avatars. If you feel they slow down Neowin, do what I do turn them off. I don't know if it helps or not, but I hate seeing all the (basicly) ads, so I turned them off.

I remember the vB days.

I been trying to access neowin for the last 10 minutes
I still say lock the forums to guests and disable image uploading

i think locking the forums to guests is a pretty drastic move for neowin, especially since it's trying to encourage a bigger better community.

disabling image uploading is probably the best method.

edit: and this is another problem. it shouldn't quote images.

Well said

no problems with banning images in sigs..

or better yet. Subscribers get to use images but non-paying don't could be another incentive.

Some kind of hotlinking server... Timdorr could make uploaded files go on another server...

EDIT: Fixed typo in uploaded

^ has a good point.

keep the website and database separate from the uploads. on separate machines..

Another thing, to keep the HTTP response headers low in size, you can always remove a few headers ->

You could hide the X-Powered-by header (In php.ini, you have the option to remove this, set expose_php = Off)
And you can aswell lower the Server (SERVER_SOFTWARE) header by entering ServerTokens Prod (Prod[uct] only) in httpd.conf

It's always been there, but they didn't want to annoy people with "donate now!" stuff, so you have to look if you want to find it.

Geez. Why are you always so cranky? He was just pointing out that some people's sigs are part of the problem. Guess what? He's right.

Eta: I see server is busy messages here every few days.

So delete the image when you quote. Isn't difficult.

Biggest way to help is to click on the adverts. Takes a few seconds and it goes towards the cost of running the site, of corse if everyone does this there will be more cash avalable for better services at the datacenter that should help neowin run better.

How about just switching from hosting to your own server? If Neowin has 3 servers and each is $400/month, that's $1200/month total.

Neowin could get Verizon FTTP 30mbit for $200/month and lay down ~$3000 for 3 servers and the servers would pay for themselves as opposed to be previous system.

I don't think sigs contribute much to the server load

Sigs aren't a problem. They are remotely hosted... unless they were uploaded as an attachment and then that would be a problem. If you see sigs hosted on Neowin... inform us and we will remove them.

Locking the forums to members and not guest is something that is never going to happen.