Shoutbox Issue

[Omar]

Is it just me or are other ppl also seeing the server is busy message where the sb is supposed to be. Just wondering.

[YoungSimba23]

its fine for me now, but a couple days ago it said that for me

[Omar]

Works fine most of the time. But sometimes that message shows.

[007]

Is it just me or are other ppl also seeing the server is busy message where the sb is supposed to be. Just wondering.

its fine for me now, but a couple days ago it said that for me

this is normal. there is a feature in vbulletin that allows you to deny visitors to the site when the server is too busy, its not a shoutbox feature, but actually a feature of the forums software. there is a reason you only see it on the shoutbox, and I will explain why.

the shoutbox is a VERY resource intense modification on the site, so much so, that back in the day when we were on a hostgator shared server, hostgator kept shutting the site down when alot of members were on because the shoutbox was crushing their server. this is one of the primary reasons we went to our own dedicated server at hostgator, so we wouldnt get shutdown all the time when we were very active.

we were fine for awhile on our own server, but as the site grew we ran into more problems, again related to the shoutbox. to counter this, i upped the server level a few times, each time increasing the cost of the server exponentially. eventually i realized as the site kept growing, this problem would keep happening until I was paying hundreds per month for the site, just to maintain a shoutbox.

because of this i moved the shoutbox to my server at home, and streamed it to the main site. this worked well, and saved me a ton of money per month, as we didnt have to increase the server level to crazy levels. this came with another problem of course. the damn shoutbox, being the resource hog that it is, was crushing my server at home. this is the same server running FTP and the Radio. I knew that if the server kept running that hot, eventually it would blow up, taking out the FTP and Radio along with the shoutbox.

one day i came up with an idea though, one that has worked very well for us. as i stated in the beginning of this post, there is a feature to deny visitors to the site when the server is too busy, to prevent overload. the reason i couldnt use this before when the shoutbox was integrated with the main sites server, is because it would take down the entire site, not just the shoutbox when the server was overloaded. by having the shoutbox on a separate server though, running a duplicate copy of the site that has been modified to only show the shoutbox, i could safely impose this feature on the shoutbox site.

i moved the shoutbox yet again, to a hostgator shared server (a separate server from the main site), and have imposed this limit. now when the shoutbox gets too busy and overloads hostgators server, rather than hostgator shutting the site down, and me have to battle them over email to get it back up, the software itself will turn away visitors until the server calms down, all without affecting the main site at all. this of course means i have to pay for 2 servers, rather than one, but 2 average level servers are still way less than one super high level server.

i hope that explanation wasnt too long and boring, and i hope you understand now lol

please let me know if you have any questions or neither further explanation

[Omar]

Thanks [MENTION=1]root..

That actually was interesting.. That's a lot of trouble though..

[YoungSimba23]

thanks for explaining [MENTION=1]root i found it interesting. good idea too

[Dominator]

intresting read [MENTION=1]root