GWJ bugs, feature requests, and updates

The trouble with moving to physical hardware is the cost. I'm not sure it's something we're prepared to do monetarily. I'd prefer to instead move to some sort of cloud hosting provider that can scale to handle fluctuations in traffic load without paying out the nose for bare metal.

doogiemac wrote:
Malor wrote:

Maybe it's time to think about promoting yourselves out of VM-land, and running on real hardware? It's 10PM, and the site is slow as molasses in January.

Yeah, it's gotta be an issue with the VM sharing physical hardware with other VMs that are chewing up resources. Looking at the system charts, when you posted that message we were running at 40% CPU for 5 min avg (very low -- we typically peak at 120-140% during very busy times). I'm posting a support ticket to Linode about it. In the past, they've explicitly moved us to different physical hardware in order to more evenly distribute the load (as opposed to letting the management tools do that for them).

Most VM services, such as Linode, really only have this problem if it's disk access or if they don't balance out their client distribution across their virtual hosts. Is the iowait on the system going through the roof? Is it possible to cache db data more efficiently (memcached?) to stop the db from using it's own disk based cache and lookups?

I went through this same stuff when I was on an OpenVZ based virtual host service and they did the "lets move you to another cluster" stuff over and over. Eventually, I went to Server Beach and have a dedicated physical server that has served me well for years.

Last I was shopping, you could get pretty good dedicated servers for $125/mo or so. And it's cheaper if you provide/colocate your own hardware, but then remote hands become much, much more expensive.

doogiemac wrote:

The trouble with moving to physical hardware is the cost. I'm not sure it's something we're prepared to do monetarily. I'd prefer to instead move to some sort of cloud hosting provider that can scale to handle fluctuations in traffic load without paying out the nose for bare metal.

That's what I was thinking would be best. Does Drupal have any cloud providers that are easy fits? I know Zend has been putting together a PHP Cloud solution that might be worth investigating, but I'm sure there are many more options.

My advice is to understand the source of the problem and then decide what to do. It's still possible that the site could perform really well on Linode with some architectural changes. Then again, it might not. Better to know and then fix it, than guess and hope.

It's Drupal 5 - not sure what architectural changes could be made. There is a project goal of updating it to run using Drupal 7, but that's is doogiemac's court.

trueheart78 wrote:

It's Drupal 5 - not sure what architectural changes could be made. There is a project goal of updating it to run using Drupal 7, but that's is doogiemac's court.

I don't know a lot about Drupal. But it's quite possible that some better features for DB interaction might need an update. I'm just a systems/operations kind of dude. Not a php/drupal developer.

I see the site has a mobile face. I wonder if the CSS could be updated to make mobile reading easier.

GWJ should get a G+ site set up so I can "+Gamers With Jobs".

I'll be killed for this...but can we get Origin in the list of GamerID's?

TheGameguru wrote:

I'll be killed for this...but can we get Origin in the list of GamerID's?

I'd like to put in another request for the 3DS friend code to be added, too.

Also, it'd be really nice to have a link to a page of people's gaming IDs on their forum posts, like beneath their location or something. I notice a lot of members use their sig lines for gaming IDs which seems redundant and discourages use of the profile feature.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I notice a lot of members use their sig lines for gaming IDs which seems redundant and discourages use of the profile feature.

Yeah, because the profile feature is just text.

Yeah if the profile ones had actual links to your page, I wouldn't have to do it in my sig. You could click my name, and click the Steam link, and boom.

Until then I keep it in the sig.

But it probably is time to add Origin. It's in some of the google spreadsheets we have floating around here for games like BF3 and ME3 which use it exclusively.

It'd be cool if we could have those spreadsheets linked to on the sidebar, when you're in Games and Platforms, or something like that. Give it a constant location. Then again, that would work as a sticky thread, too, so maybe just ignore me.

The thing with spreadsheets is someone has to know to go looking for them, people have to manually think to put their various tags in their sig to be visible (and there's a limit on sig length) I've seen forums with a bunch of icons that are linked to your profile as a good thing if that's workable.

I just did a new Firefox install, and I see the posts are now colored alternately kinda pink and kinda gray. Is this a new site feature? If so, is there a way to turn it off? I find it very distracting.

edit: aha, I found it. I'd told the Catalyst Control Center to use monitor EDID data for color. For whatever reason, this particular forum looks all basically whitish-backgrounded on regular color mode, but when CCC is set to use EDID on my monitor, it switches to alternating pink and gray. So I guess there's some kind of subtle color-swapping going on that we're not supposed to be able to normally see.

second edit: ah, I do see the very, very slight difference between alternating posts now. Never noticed it before. When the lighter color was pushed into 'pink' territory, it looked WEIRD.

Posts normally alternate between a light grey (#F9F9F9) and a slightly darker grey (#EFEFEF). They really ought to be strongly differentiated enough on your monitor for you to tell them apart.

My avatar depends on it!

Yeah, I can see the difference when I look for it, I just never noticed it before.

When it was pink, however, THAT I noticed.

Proper colour reproduction and being able to see distinctions between shades is something I take semi-seriously. Go google image search for "monitor calibration" and you'll find some charts. See if you can get it so you can see all the different bands on each scale. This is why I generally don't use, or have a light hand with things like digital vibrance, as while it boosts the colour saturation you often lose something with it.

Yeah, I had a monitor calibrator, but they stopped supporting it, trying to force me to buy a new one for Win7. Not happy about that, and I haven't bought another.

Not like that, I know the devices you're talking about though. I'm thinking of a bit more rudimentary, tinkering with your controls on your monitor and graphics card control panel, and a chart like the ones half way down this page. You should get it so you can see distinctions between each segment of every bar.

Tiny suggestion:

The message box for Private Messages is so small. So very, very small. Typing a message of any decent length besides "Hi what's up" involves a lot of scrolling. I use Chrome at home and can expand said text box as much as I want, but it seems like something that could be bigger. (And relatively easy to change.)

I realize that a mobile interface is a big undertaking and that an overhaul isn't really in the works right now, but could I suggest one teeny tiny change to the mobile interface? Could the itty bitty link to logout not be right next to the itty bitty link to the Recent Posts page?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I realize that a mobile interface is a big undertaking and that an overhaul isn't really in the works right now, but could I suggest one teeny tiny change to the mobile interface? Could the itty bitty link to logout not be right next to the itty bitty link to the Recent Posts page?

Heh, yeah, that's a good one. I've been hit by that a lot.

Michael wrote:

Tiny suggestion:

The message box for Private Messages is so small. So very, very small. Typing a message of any decent length besides "Hi what's up" involves a lot of scrolling. I use Chrome at home and can expand said text box as much as I want, but it seems like something that could be bigger. (And relatively easy to change.)

What browser do you use? I can drag any multiline textbox to whatever size I want.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I realize that a mobile interface is a big undertaking and that an overhaul isn't really in the works right now, but could I suggest one teeny tiny change to the mobile interface? Could the itty bitty link to logout not be right next to the itty bitty link to the Recent Posts page?

This times a billion.

I'll Nth that, especially for my iPad. Even with my stylus I'll end up on the wrong end of that one.

Scratched wrote:
Michael wrote:

Tiny suggestion:

The message box for Private Messages is so small. So very, very small. Typing a message of any decent length besides "Hi what's up" involves a lot of scrolling. I use Chrome at home and can expand said text box as much as I want, but it seems like something that could be bigger. (And relatively easy to change.)

What browser do you use? I can drag any multiline textbox to whatever size I want.

As I said in my post, I use Chrome. I also said that I'm aware I can expand the text box as much as I want - I was simply suggesting that the default perhaps need not be quite so small.

The icon for pinned threads with unread posts should be yellow, not gray, or have some other way of distinguishing it from a pinned thread with no unread posts.