27th October 2012
Oooh hello, we've not updated in a while, so here's an update about some things going on right now...
Speeeeeeed
We've been working heard behind the scenes to make sure that TowersStreet site (especially since launching to our new Wordpress platform) and the TowersStreet forums remain working at top speed, delivering great content in the blink of an eye for you.
We know that things had been slowing slightly over the last few weeks, but we've made some great changes to try and speed things up a little for you.
A couple of those changes are behind the scenes, but a couple of them are also changes that you will see more obviously.
Lets start with the behind the scenes stuff...
- We've installed APC accelerator to speed up the PHP code by implementing opcode caching. And if I've lost you now, thats great, dont worry - basically we have a new bit of software that stores the PHP in a special code that makes it REALLY fast for the CPU to process.
- We've installed some other accelerating and caching software across the main site (which was causing problems earlier, sorry about that!) to speed things up for everyone
- We've also implemented a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to help file caching and speed - so no matter where you are in the world, you'll receive TowersStreet from your nearest and fastest location in a compressed and speedy fashion. You might notice some odd things though with file locations being slightly different in the code or when the page is loading, but it shouldnt affect your experience. The CDN also helps us by keeping the site up and running 24/7 no matter if our server has a wobbly with its DNS.
And the in front of the scenes stuff....
- You'll now notice that "topic participation icons" are no longer available - this is where the icon was slightly changed to show where you had participated in a topic (but not searches! they remain unaffected, so your 'new replies' search will still work).
- You'll also notice that the forum stats have now gone and will stop tracking - this isn't being we don't want you to see them, but rather they add upto 5-6 queries per page load just to track what's going on, and for the sake of some pretty numbers that is a fair performance hit on the server as we grow.
None of these options are without great benefit to the speed and usability of the site, and in fact if you read the SMF forums they recommend making these changes to help keep your forum running smoothly for everyone, particularly as forums grow and become more and more popular.
We need to monitor our resource usage also as we're on a
super duper expensive dedicated server that costs thousands per month VPS (or Virtual Private Server) that is generally cheaper to run yet offers great power and customisation, but shares resources with many other websites, and we don't want to fall foul of usage policies that may see us kicked out of the door for becoming too popular.
Obviously there is a lot more still ahead for us, but for now thats the big updates in the mean time!
As usual please post any questions or feedback in the Discussion topic located just beneath this topic.
Thanks all
