[RNB65]

Why does THR go down so often? THR has the most unplanned downtime of any discussion board I visit. Just wondering.

[haole_boySS]

I'm glad someone responded. The downtime is getting out of control. Its at least once a day that I can't access the board.

[mec]

It would be nice if somebody would respond to this. It might be of interest right now as one forum has reported a large number of hacking attacks. It would be interesting to know if its an anti-gun sort of thing or if the other forum is experiencing it because the owner has alienated a lot of former participants.

[RNB65]

The reason I asked is because I work in the IT field. If we had as much downtime as THR, heads would role (and have). Unplanned downtime is inexcusable.

[WayneConrad]

I'll bet the admins would love to have commercial-grade uptime, but that usually come with a commercial-grade salary and budget. ;)

[Mal H]

RNB65 - We'll try to do better.

I am curious though, how much productivity and profitability did you lose during the outage?

[mec]

I was merely curious because another board has experienced some outages due to hackers. It is not overwhelmingly important but it might be interesting to know if somebody is actively disrupting gun boards at this time.

I was not complaining. It did not negatively affect my life in any way. Merely curious.

[RNB65]

Not much. But I have to wander over to TFL, AR15.com, or XDTalk and they're just not as much fun as THR. :)

[daysleeprx]

"Inexcusable" ?

I love it when people complain about a service that is absolutely free.

[tyme]

Why does THR go down so often? THR has the most unplanned downtime of any discussion board I visit. Just wondering.
Mainly because searching in vbulletin is implemented horribly. Very few people are motivated to improve it, because it's the kind of improvement that requires real database knowledge, and people like that can get paid to do work rather than volunteering time to fix vbulletin.

vBulletin works fine if searching is disabled, but searching is one of the major features of the board.

Would you rather have searching, or would you rather have better uptime and no search feature?

AR-15.com uses some seriously hacked-up version of something (and I bet more than a couple servers), and glocktalk has like 3-5 webservers and at least one dedicated database server.

THR runs on a single machine.

About the only thing that could be done would be to run Xen, split the machine into 2 VMs each with 1 processor, dedicate one VM to a replicated, read-only copy of the database. Then that VM could go all to hell with searches, and still leave the board somewhat responsive... I think (I haven't tried it, but I'm thinking about it with TFL).

The bottom line is that even if the database is on a ramdisk or is entirely cached in memory, certain searches for common words end up taking on the order of a minute, because of the asinine table join vbulletin does for searches.

That's absurd. Any database query on a public site that takes more than a few seconds is broken and must either be fixed or eliminated.