OT: RealGM Buggy?

[moofs]

Anyone else having problems with threads not showing up as "Read" or refreshing right now?

[Optimism Prime]

Nope--RealGM just hates you.






You troll.

[RaoulDuke79]

I too have noticed this bizarre occurence, and I must say it's a bit annoying.

The real question is, who is to blame? And what should we do about it?

[Amel]

this whole forum sucks ass

I hope they switch to vbulletin or ibp sometime soon

[jove9]

I think it's Adelman's fault. First he ruins Yao's game, then he ruins RealGm.

Tell them, Compucomp!

[aznkillabeezZz]

realgm has always sucked. They spam you with alot of ads to make money off of there members. Everyone should get an adblocker....

Can someone hook me up with a clutchfans ticket, because i want to get traded, sick of realgm. PM me please, because i had problems registering at clutchfans, hence this is why i'm still in this adspamhole.

[TMU]

realgm has always sucked. They spam you with alot of ads to make money off of there members. Everyone should get an adblocker....

Can someone hook me up with a clutchfans ticket, because i want to get traded, sick of realgm. PM me please, because i had problems registering at clutchfans, hence this is why i'm still in this adspamhole.

No, you stay here.

[aznkillabeezZz]

After all the money they make from us. They still harass you with your sig sizes even when it only exceeds less than 1 mm .Yeah i'm sure exceeding by 1 mm will steal major bandwidth.

[spolgar]

Aight, this is quite possibly the number one fan forum for all nba teams as a conglomerate. The bandwidth bill here is substanial. This site is a linux box running php on apache, using phpBB as a framework with a database backend. That's already 2-5 computers and if their setup is professional, a decent fibre channel array for raid 5. That's over half a rack of space gone. If this is a colo-ed setup where the computers are realgms and they don't have to share them with anybody, you still have literally thousands of users per second coming and going every minute or so. The webserver not withstanding, the amount of storage that houses all your messages for several years back, all of which stored in a database (that is generally mysql or postgresql) gets slower as the database gets larger. Constant disk and bandwidth upgrades are essential. On top of that, they have to get writers to contribute. That also cost money.

This is a hobbyist site. You go on clutchfans and if you are on a non-donation account, you don't even get to edit your posts after you submit them. And clutchfans has ads just like we do here, except they do the google adwords thing whilst realgm uses banners.

By the way, banner ads don't always translate to revenue. Most sites on the web get paid per ad *clicked* on rather than just renting a space on the page. All things considered, with the amount of traffic this site moves everyday, especially when move closer and closer to march/april/may, I don't see how they break even. A standard web/unix admin of a site of this caliber would be contracted, costing anywhere from 75 dollars an hour (cheap as **** prices from Kansas) to 200... Adding on to that colo prices of at least 600 bucks a month plus _bandwidth_, and somewhere the math doesn't quite add up for me. This is a service that rarely ever goes down, has okay page load times and a non-obtrusive ad on the left. On top of that, I pay nothing to use it. If you got a bug, go write a bug report and submit it to somebody. If they fix it, be glad. If they don't, they're busy.

[spolgar]

I too have noticed this bizarre occurence, and I must say it's a bit annoying.

The real question is, who is to blame? And what should we do about it?

This is what is happening. Everytime you go to Realgm, the page is rendered for you dynamically, i.e. in real time. When the site is loaded, each page is rendered slower. Your browser has a time limit as to how long it would wait for the page to be completed. After that, it just renders what it has downloaded from the site thus far, and hope that it is functional. It's expected, normal and CORRECT behavior.

If there is anyone to blame, the general culprit of phpbb slowdowns come from the database end of the setup. If they are using mysql and it's not tuned right, or there are simply too many connections from the webserver hitting the database, then no matter how fast the box, the architecture of mysql will just fall over. It doesn't handle too many connections very well.

If they are using postgresql or any otherwise normal database server, then the whole setup is just overloaded. Come back in a few hours and it'll be fine.

[spolgar]

this whole forum sucks ass

I hope they switch to vbulletin or ibp sometime soon

Good god no. Phpbb is the most stable php generated forum there is. Anything else is buggier, fancier or less tried and trued, which quite honestly they don't need it. They need something that scales on the web end and takes less of a hammering on the database backend. Unless they write the entire thing all over again using some other underlying tech, php is only going to scale so far. But, it's open source, it's stable, it's secure and bug fixes are free. That and there are about 1 million phpbb sites out there, so there's no shortage for help if something goes wrong.

[Amel]

there are 100 of sites that have: more forum members, more posts, more threads, private messages....and they still run much better than phpbb and this website,

I personaly thinkg its horrible, I hate that jump after I post a message

[spolgar]

Oh come on. You can't stand a page refresh? Yeah there are hundreds of sites out there that you can post without a page refresh, but it involves each page to render javascript controls for the browser as well as the formatting. That would mean me the client of each service taking slightly longer time for the page to load. If I have 10 tabs open on firefox, it'll pile up and really piss me off. It would call for additional processing power on the server end, and with 1000 users the slight tax looks like a running herd. Not only would this call for bigger boxes, it necessitates completely restructuring the server backends, and it is nigh impossible to port the users and message archives over to the new database that stores these things. And you know what, the history of the community built makes the community. We rely on those archives when we post, about who said what and when. It's a big deal.

I say keep it simple stupid. I care only that you or I can post, and I can read what you or I wrote. That's ultimately what matters when you are building a community. Everything else is just frills.

As for the powers that be that move this site, regardless of total technical expertise, server farm size, complexity of code, if you're comparting realgm to yahoo, google, something awful, 4chan, slashdot, kuro5hin etc it really becomes a comparasion akin to apples and oranges. If you want to recommend a php framework for message boards, that is free, scales to 100000 users on any given day, costs nothing to the actual entity of Realgm, is steadfastly maintained by debian (whom make sure it's stable and runs on their platform solidly), then you should go make a recommendation to the staff. But when I look at the staff page alone and I see literally hundreds of mods, each answering to at least one board on the staff page that probably serve 50 people throughout the entire day. Most of these people don't get paid probably. This is done entirely as a hobby and it is very very good for what it is. I won't even begin to know who to talk to, so your guess would be as good as mine as to whom to contact.

I look after machines like this for over 10 years before I went back to school to try something else. This is a well run site, with excellent mods and a very good community behind it. That makes the site. The forum software works as advertised. It's php for christ sakes.

Regardless, you're bitching about a free service that provides fans from around the world to come together. It takes some frigging audacity to be jumping up and down someone's work that probably took them hundreds of man hours, just because you can't stand a page refresh and weird page loads at peak times. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you ought to go build another community on your own and we'll all see if you do better, oh I don't know, say 5 years from now ?

[Amel]

cliffs?

[moofs]

Nice posts Spolgar. I've been in software development for about 4 years, just moved over to asp.net about 6 months ago (I think I made pretty nice progress in that time, too), and am still trying to learn a lot of things like these. (If you know any particularly good sources, I'm all ears - gonna run into something like this eventually I'm sure)

[spolgar]

I'm sorry man, I can't help you with asp.net. Other than rolling a bacula (http://www.bacula.org) windows client using a linux development kit (yeah... linux generated windows binary with installer...) I haven't written a damn thing on or for windows since 1995 in my gcse computer class. As per forum programming, most of the time I'm just asked to do some changes to some phpbb code, so I go on the site, look at the source (php is actually easy enough to read if it's done properly...) and stick things here and there with comments sandwiching the code segments. I don't write php professionally, and the sites I do have much lower traffic on much smaller boxes, so I can actually have a weekend of downtime to figure it out.

With any luck, I'll be out of computers professionally in 2 years. Please god please... lemme leave.

[TMU]

You programmers are nuts...

[spolgar]

I donno. Programmers are quirky... I got a math degree, and I can honestly say that most of my classmates who were admitted in grad school are... to be quite honest, are either hysterically complicated or dysfunctional. Most of the time both.

But truth be told, colorful people are a wee bit crazy. Adds to the charm.

[moofs]

I like to run into walls and fall off anything that looks fun.

Should be a blast around the time I turn 65 (if)

Hobbies aside, I didn't mean so much asp.net (didn't sound like it) as general um... web architecturing something or other and stress loading or uh, something something stuff. To me, it sounded like you were more on the hardware/configuration end. I'm looking to know more about that to assist in designing my apps with scalability in mind, assuming it's even applicable. For all I know, with webdev, I just need to keep performance in mind. Either way, s'bit OT.

I got a math degree, and I can honestly say that most of my classmates who were admitted in grad school are... to be quite honest, are either hysterically complicated or dysfunctional. Most of the time both.

Yeah, *most of (just remembered one normal one heee) the math grad students I knew were all close to literally being nuts. The engineers were the sane ones. Same thing except one works only with imaginary things and the other keeps it real.

[spolgar]

Heh, making web code scale and fast is something I don't have an answer to. I would think that since each thread of web code (at least on the unix side) runs on it's own process (at least in apache) and each thread of read/write on the database is often times the same (forks off children, child runs the needed script, dies, resurrects again) that single tier stuff doesn't really need awesome design and architecture so long as the database(s) were designed to scale across multiple machines. That's really where the bottleneck is for most sites. More often than not a good sysadmin can tweak the apps to make them run faster, and the apps scale simply because there is more head room.

The real code monkey part of scaling stems of tiering your architecture into segmentations that be offloaded to other places (machines) to be executed. A basic thing I looked up on the web is http://www.15seconds.com/issue/011023.htm. I hope that's applicable.

This book might also help:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2apps/