FORUM UPDATE NEEDED?

[kram1032]

So since this poll has ended up being rather conclusive, is there any kind of timeline you can share? Or is this still being discussed?

[Sockratease]

So since this poll has ended up being rather conclusive, is there any kind of timeline you can share? Or is this still being discussed?

This will be happening.

As for a timeline...  Yes, I can definitely say with no fear of contradiction, that it will be  ...  Slow!

We already had one problem when the transfer of a database was done in a hurry and it overloaded the server.

There was resistance to the idea, and that's why this poll was made.  Just to see what the community thought.

But to us it was incredibly important to just get started, and do it methodically with no hurrying.  The database transfer is underway, but not too quickly since we really like our servers and overloading them makes them sad. 

Once it's set up, we'll probably do something crazy like ask for volunteers from the members to help out just using it and giving feedback to make it as good as it can be.

I can't put any specific time span for when that will happen, but I like to think it will be no more than a few months to get it done right.

[cKleinhuis]

as sock put it, the transfer will take longer than assumed by me, it is crucial but since this is not a single page website the transfer will take, it will be the least painful for users as possible which means accounts will come with, and a nice clean rework of how things are organized is planed to make it into the update

[zebastian]

Some things to consider:

The server is running PHP5.2.17 which is from January 2011
There has been happening a lot of changes with this, by upgrading to newer stable version from the package manager (5.6, 5.7 maybe even 7.x) you can expect more than double the performance (except for time taken to execute the mysql queries).

When you are doing an upgrade I think it would be most reasonable to upgrade the full server stack and the OS: dist-upgrade / Apache / Mysql / PHP

Another performance boost can be connecting PHP to MySQL not over TCP/IP but over a socket.
But these are all changes which might break the running system.

I think page performance is the most interesting part of the upgrade:
- user needs to wait less (right now its 300-400ms for each page right now)
- leverages server load

Also the view for mobile devices could be better, hope a forum update addresses this.

Here is an analysis of the website:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=de&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fractalforums.com%2F&tab=desktop

Seems to be that images are not compressed properly here:
http://nocache-nocookies.digitalgott.com/gallery/*
these could be losslessly compressed by another 348 kb from 674kb (~50% of the whole frontpage!).

[cKleinhuis]

@sebastian leveraging server load would help a lot the php version is in fact the most crucial thing that is making problems, like the wrong encoding of escaping special chars has obviously changed

i made a huge effort a few years ago to deliver images using a cdn and putting them on a different server, this is a tedious process, the front page loading is quite hacky because in fact i display html scaled full images for the gallery comments, it is indeed quite heavy, checking out modern templates will also go into that process

regarding general server calculation time, the new forum will start with blank content, so everything related to database queries will get a small boost, but a huge site with full fledged dynamic queries on front page will still be a huge problem, displaying user information, bot information, recent posts, recent gallerys and all that sum up to the very slow loading of frontpage, this is nothing i can adress without diving deep into the forums system, many many stuff and plugins is draining the performance

and at the end of the day everything is hosted on a 20Euro server so they do a pretty good job in hosting this site for 10 years now and this will continue as it was before, so, low budget hosting will continue, perhaps some kind of static front page could help but as i said it would introduce fine tuning which is not planned, the plan is to bring the forum on the current software base and make up for latest php and sql  and old security issues like sessionid transfered in url using non https servers is the foremost thing to achieve with the update

performance is not main priority, content delivery sytems that can easily wordwide performance is a thing that is relatively easy, for dynmic pages not so much but for the static content it is important

[kram1032]

You're going to transfer all the accounts? At the very least I'd suggest giving all the ones who never posted a thing a generous time limit of, say, a year to log into the new page once, after which the account data would just get deleted and they'd have to open a new one if they want back. If their activity was so low it's likely no different to them than it would be with a transfer in the first place. Possibly that should actually apply to everybody. As is, stats like user numbers are rather useless. There are supposedly 5989 members and 4.69 registrations per day. And almost 50 thousand page views a day? (Can that statistic factor out crawler bots?)

Though more importantly, if possible, please restructure the forum topics while you are at it. Whenever I try to decide where to put a new topic, it's kind of a pain to even navigate all the available options, let alone decide where I should put them. And the same goes for even finding old topics: I'll usually remember, roughly, how a given topic was called, but based on that, if it didn't see activity within the last three days or so, it's incredibly hard to find again. At which point Search comes into play, except the forum's search functionality is as good as useless, barely finding any terms I'm 100% positive were either in the topic title or prominently features in the post.
In fact, these days, IF I try to find anything in this forum, I resort to

Code:

<Search Term> site:fractalforums.com

on Google. There my desired result is usually within the top three, whereas the Forum's search will often claim there isn't even a single match.

[zebastian]

My suggestion for a safe upgrade:
1. create a new folder for the next website: /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
2. create a new apache config for another domain: next.fractalforums.com and point to new created folder
3. download and unpack newest stable 2.x version of smf to the new folder and test if running
4. export and import old database to new system (hope smf has got a script todo that)
5. install plugins (hope none have vanished in new version)
6. check everything is running
7. point the general domain at /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
8. archive old system (web and database)

points 1 - 6 can be done and tested without interfering with the existing fractalforums.com (except for some generated server load)
if step 4 till 8 can happen quickly, thats fine, otherwise the fresh changes to the database have to be reimported to the new system.

In order to safe upgrade PHP and co, there is no way todo this on one machine (except for do and pray  )

[lycium]

In order to safe upgrade PHP and co, there is no way todo this on one machine (except for do and pray   )

Obligatory:




Great to see the site getting upgraded! Hope it goes well, Christian

[claude]

...
Google. There my desired result is usually within the top three, whereas the Forum's search will often claim there isn't even a single match.

I think the forum search searches locally to the subforum you are in, so if you want to find everything from all subforums you better click Home first...

[kram1032]

For one thing I'm pretty sure that can be set in the various advanced search settings. For another, I definitely saw poor search results even from Home.
Or to be more precise, I didn't use the search bar in the top right, I used the SEARCH tab.

[cKleinhuis]

lets hope the text indexing will get fixed in updated forum, still having problems getting it to run though and soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo few time