Forum Weirdness

[Keldoclock]

Take off every

[Predator]

HOLY Shit this forum is getting wierd. All my noteblocks are belong to it.

[Apollyon]

I complained before but i do not remember where.

While i can live with the forum being considerably slower than it used to be when just reading it, it is super annoying that you cannot make posts anymore containing more than x pictures. You just have to split up a forum battle into multiple posts, it takes ages for the forum to process such a post and sometimes it decides six photos are too much and you have to split again.

I would appreciate it if someone could look into this because i'd rather spend 75% of my time on playing a forum battle, and 25% on posting instead of the other way round. Tank you.

[stubby]

Weird, I haven't seen this on my end, everything loads instantly except the banner. Did this start when Natalya put the rotating banners in, or was it doing that to you before that?

[Apollyon]

I noticed it first when i posted pictures of my supertank and armies in the armoury. That was after the new homepage and already with dynamic banners.

[stubby]

Hmm okay. I know what needs to be done to fix the banners from eating so much processor/data bandwidth, I was just prioritizing chapter 10 first. I'll bump that up to the top of the list to do next and we'll see if it fixes things.

[Tzan]

I think he is complaining about a picture limit in posting more than speed issues.
It just takes him more time to make more posts.

[Apollyon]

Yes. Though the forum is slower than other phpBB boards i frequent. But that might just be a slow server hosting it.

[Zupponn]

There's a picture limit? I haven't run into that problem.

[stubby]

It has to do with the amount of processing time each picture takes. The forum software analyzes them for things like image size limits and such. If you're posting during a heavy-traffic time of day, sometimes the processing time takes longer than the posting timeout.

I think a lot of this is because the banner rotations are set to display images directly through PHP, rather than through writing an image tag into the HTML, which means a bunch of PHP cycles spent on image processing and forces clients to download the data each time rather than pulling from their own caches. It's an easy fix, I just haven't had time / working internet for the past couple of days to edit the code.

[Apollyon]

It has to do with the amount of processing time each picture takes. The forum software analyzes them for things like image size limits and such. If you're posting during a heavy-traffic time of day, sometimes the processing time takes longer than the posting timeout.

Maybe it is because i host my pictures at Brickshelf at the moment? Maybe it is too slow to answer the forum about whatever it needs to know about the pictures from the host location.

[stubby]

I rewrote the image rotation code for the main brikwars page so it wasn't pushing all the image data through PHP, but because of the way the forums work, I wasn't able to duplicate the effect. I turned image rotation off in here for now. Hopefully the response time in here will be a lot better.

[Apollyon]

Hopefully the response time in here will be a lot better.

It is.

[Natalya]

It has to do with the amount of processing time each picture takes. The forum software analyzes them for things like image size limits and such. If you're posting during a heavy-traffic time of day, sometimes the processing time takes longer than the posting timeout.

I think a lot of this is because the banner rotations are set to display images directly through PHP, rather than through writing an image tag into the HTML, which means a bunch of PHP cycles spent on image processing and forces clients to download the data each time rather than pulling from their own caches. It's an easy fix, I just haven't had time / working internet for the past couple of days to edit the code.

So the forum PHP analyzes even the banner image? That's why it was always slow?

[stubby]

So the forum PHP analyzes even the banner image? That's why it was always slow?

Not quite - but making the PHP engine load the image data and spit it back into HTML clogs up PHP cycles it needs to analyze other images, and (more importantly) browsers can't cache a PHP image, since they change all the time.

So what I did on the main banner was to replace

Code: Select all

<img src="image.php">

with

Code: Select all

echo '<img src="image_' . $lol . '.jpg">';

which has the PHP spit out the html code to load the proper image rather than trying to spit out the image itself, so the browser can cache each of the images as they come up.

I couldn't do it in the forum yet though, because the forum templates aren't set up to allow inline executable code like echo commands. I could do it through javascript instead, but enough people turn off javascript that it might not be worth it.