What the heck is with the site outages?
What the heck is with the site outages?
I'll tell you why. Simtropolis has been a website since 2002/2003. The database for the forums, STEX, and anything else dirk needed was also put in at that same time. Over 6 yeas, the database has been bombarded with forum posts, blog posts, STEX uploads, you name it, it's in there. The code on the pages of the website has to look through all the thousands and thousands of entry's of the database to find the information you requested through your web browser. This puts enormous strain on the SImtropolis Server as it is trying to request that service for 80+ users at a time.Put it this way. When you open up a program, say, Firefox. Does it open right away? Not always, it depends on how many programs are already running and the speed of your computer. Let's say it is a computer within the last couple years. It generally opens up within seconds.
Instead of opening one, if you click the firefox icon 80 times and see how long it takes for your computer to open all of them up, it won't, it will probably lock up, overheat, or restart itself. This is what happens with the Simtropolis server when it tries to produce the information you requested. It tries, locks up, and restarts.
Why are the download speeds so slow?
The reason the download speeds are so slow is largely due to the problem mentioned above. The second major problem is the amount of outgoing bandwidth allowed for Simtropolis each month. Dirk (The webmaster & Site owner) Must pay for the bandwidth each month to keep Simtropolis flowing smoothly. In order to provide maximum download speeds, there needs to be a set amount of outgoing bandwidth set aside for the STEX. When this amount is peaked, the speeds slow down dramatically because the host has disabled the amount of bandwidth Simtropolis can use at one time.
How could we fix this?
Obvoiusly it is a large commitment, but consider a donation to Simtropolis. No, i'm not on an ad campaign for the STEX disks, but I assure you, they are worth it and it does go to a good cause: Your favorite website. :)
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Thanks,
Larks
That said, I would like to suggest some sort of web page reorganization so pages don't have to look through the entire database for every web page. And there is indexing that can greatly speed database access. When I took computer science, one text book was entitled "Data structures + Algorithms = Programs". The implication is data structures are as important as the algorithms.
My I help in any way to optimize? I have been a professional programmer since 1981. At that time professional business personal computers (they were called Microcomputers at that time) had
an 8-bit processor running at 4MHz, 60kB of RAM (yes, that's kilobytes), 2kB of BIOS in ROM, and 2kB of video memory. They had 2 5.25" floppy disk drives, each holding
1.0 MB of data. Yes, when IBM came out with their first PC a couple years later, IBM only used 320kB floppies. Business PCs before that used 1MB floppies. While I was at that job the first 5MB hard drives came out. We used the CP/M operating system by Digital Research (before Microsoft came out with MS-DOS version 1.0), and a BASIC interpreter. We didn't have a compiler or even an assembler at first. To get the computer to perform with good speed, I had to write critical subroutines in machine language. Since we had no assembler, I had to hand assemble into numeric OP codes and enter those numbers into the BASIC source code. The point is I learned how to optimize by necessity. At one job in the spring of 2001, we developed software for a
manufacturer; the Netpliance i-Opener. Criticize it what you will, but it was small, inexpensive, and the use interface was designed for the "technologically challenged". One day I was asked to add a spelling checker to the email program. They used QNX operating system because it is rock-solid, just never crashes. But one way QNX does that is it doesn't have a virtual memory system; when you run out of RAM, you're just out. They had downloaded an open source spelling checker, but it took 300kB of RAM. I said "let me look at it". I used the dictionary from the open source program, but rewrote the spell-checking software from scratch. It didn't have sound-alike suggestions (Netpliance didn't want to pay for the time it would take to develop that), but ran fast and only took 4KB of program RAM and 4.4kB of RAM for data. It fit. I left the dictionary on the flash file system, kept only an index in RAM. I wrote it to keep track of changed sections of the email and only trigger a spell checking cycle at a pause in typing, but despite the fact the i-Opener was slow, I got it down to just 1/10th of a second pause. Their customers typically use "hunt and peck" typing, so that was effectively real-time spell checking. The point is I know how to optimize. So can I help you?
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