[bunni]

I posted this on your user page but it should be here in case anyone else misses it.

server upgrade

We serve up a lot of images and need to step up on both the speed and size of the drives along with the speed of the processors. We're currently on a 4 core 2.4Ghz Xeon server (which we are constantly maxing out). The upgrade I was looking at is an 8 core 3Ghz Xeon box with a 15k RPM 72GB drive. We would keep the current server as a 'failover' which would also host the latest backup. bunni 03:41, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


I just checked out the server stats, removing the front page screencaps reduced the server's processor load 30%. We need to figure out a way to just show a single image and link to the article, maybe we use the movie poster image? Or just select one highlight shot? We could use the same choose and option code we had been using and just insert a standard image tag with a screenshot of our choosing linking to the page? That may be the quickest way to work it for now. bunni 03:48, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I just update the front page with some simple code of a single screenshot and a link to the featured article - everyone should be able to easily work off of the two examples there.

Also, the conversation we had on my talk page.

Screenshots

Bunni, please do tell...how are we doing as far as server capacity goes? Do you want me (and other admins) to engage in another huge deleting spree of unused images/pages? We did it a while ago, but if it would help, please don't hesitate to ask.
Also, what kind of server upgrade do you need? -MT2008 03:33, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


Yeah, I admit that many of us (myself included) have been getting WAY out of hand with screencaps. I used to make pages where I might have 10 images for a single gun, which is definitely overdoing it. And since many of our pages are the ones getting used for the Featured Article section, it makes sense. If you want, we can always start enforcing rules against having so many screencaps. As far as the new server goes, how much are you going to need? In the forum, we've discussed the possibility of finding advertisers. This site's Main Page has had over 1,000,000 views, and in the last month since we reached that benchmark, we've now had close to 200,000 more. At that rate, we can definitely start shopping around for sponsorship deals, especially in the American gun owning community. It might help with finding money to upgrade servers. The idea for the Main Page that you have seems like a decent enough idea, but I just worry that it will take away a great deal of the visual splendor from the site. After all, featured pages do a great job of showing casual viewers what IMFDB is like. An alternative might be to start being a LOT more frugal about what pages we put on. We can limit it only to articles that have, say, no more than 20 guns and no more than 3 images of each. I would be willing to edit some of my pages to fit this standard. -MT2008 04:00, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I know what you're saying about the featured page, and that was my intention when I first added featured articles to the front page - but at this point we are receiving enough traffic that it has become a serious strain. I've just updated the front page with a couple examples of what I was talking about using only one screenshot and then linking to the article. We have so many new visitors daily that I think it's important our front page load quickly so they can access the rest of the site - I don't want to discourage new visitors with an unusually long load time as their very first experience with the imfdb. bunni 04:05, 22 March 2009 (UTC)