If I hadn't read the last few posts, I'd have probably noticed it sometime in 2004.

I bet it will be Cindy, within the hour. Starting now.

Yeah, except I suggested we shut it off now.

Cross-posted with Bureaucracy:

With all this talk of dedicated hosting, I feel like I should explain something about that option. Call it a warning or a disclaimer or whatever. A dedicated server may not necessarily be the best solution for us and it certainly won't solve all our problems.

Yes, when all is said and done, we may very well end up needing a dedicated server. But people should be aware that the kind of dedicated server we will be able to afford, as a community, will be significantly less powerful than the server we are residing on currently.

The server that we were on before? The one that we slowed to a crawl before they suspended us? That was probably more powerful than what we'd end up on with our own dedicated server.

Of course, there are some upsides to dedicated. The most obvious is that, no matter how much we talk, no one can boot us. Another is that while we have fewer resources at our disposal, we don't have to share those resources with anyone. But connections that aren't closing will bog us down and any server sluggish and slow, dedicated or otherwise.

I sense that some of you are impatient and want to just find a solution already but please keep in mind that, no matter where we end up residing, debugging the code and finding ways to streamline operations is essential to the future health of this board.

Just something to keep in mind.

ita, when you were adding in explicit closes, did you take a look at threadsuck? I'm actually reading this thread from the beginning to see what features we added and I noticed that we added it toward the beginning of this year. Since I don't know how threadsucking works, I thought that if it was a separate script it might have been missed in the latest check.

Kristen, I added the close to the function that opens.

Open - run whatever query was supplied -- close ---- get to processing.

That's why I'm concerned/confused it hasn't made a big difference.

Well, I emailed Steven to mention the change to the quote generator and asked him to let me know how much of a difference it makes over the next few days. I mean, if we were at say 150 connections, we should drop to 75 now.

Also, I agree it's worrisome. On the other hand, I can't see how we had 100 people posting at once, much less the same moment.

Shot in the dark. Do user sessions open connections to the database, or is that just strictly cookies and/or session variables?

Here's my last xpost:

Why not move ALL closed threads off this board? Leave them up for ONE WEEK, no more than that. Then we put the in "The Attic."

We could have them hosted by Fangeek, at a pretty minimal price (I know da owners, I'll haggle). That should lighten the "click through" load on the server, substantially. The threads would be available for read only, just not on this board.

They don't have to be here.

Speaking of the archives, are the subdomains working yet so that I can get to the archives ftp? And if so, what address do I use?

They are working again. If the FTP account is already set up, you should be able to login through ftp.buffistas.org.