Techy Blog Part 1 (updated)

This is post one of my, hopefully, fairly regular blog posts on what’s happening with the website. Announcements, that sort of thing.

The first thing then is the state of the search in the forums…

Traffic to the website has more than doubled in the past year, and at the time of writing we have 1176820 posts in the forum with almost 3000 being added every day. If someone decides to search the forums, especially if they decided on the “all time” search, it temporarily locks up the database. On a Monday lunch time, our busiest period, a few people would search at the same time bringing the whole site to a complete standstill for a few minutes at a time. This was also starting to happen at our less busy periods so the decision was taken to offload searches to Google (they’re search masters).

A few people have pointed out they don’t like how Google returns the results (even with the Advanced Search?), so when we get our new servers up and running we will be mirroring the database and sending all search requests off to that, which should only be a few minutes behind the main site database. I’m not putting a completion time on this because we have to get the new servers up and running, transfer the site over to them, and sort the hiccups on the way (there are always hiccups), then we’ll sort the search.

So there you have it. You can’t argue with that can you?

In other news, only 8% of site visits are from Internet Explorer 6. And we had 43 visits from IE5.5 last month, HAHA!

Update:

Blue = Internet Explorer, Green = Firefox, Orange = Safari, Yellow = Chrome.