Lately I find the site's response quite sluggish, but mainly when creating a new post.

During the delay period Firefox displays "Sending request to vintage-radio.com.au ..." which can be seen for 30 seconds or longer.

During subsequent editing of a new post the response is fine. Very odd.

Yes, it looks like the database for General Discussion is getting too big. Other forums seem fine.

Last weekend I pinpointed the issue and it's not one I can fix easily - for now. It's a case of too many members rather than database too big.

When one starts a new thread or adds a comment to an existing thread a fairly basic loop runs to update the 'unread comments' column in every member's section with their latest number of unread postsand this powers everyone's unread post highlighting function, which makes the thread topics bold and turns the notepad icons in the left site column yellow instead of white.

In a week or two, certainly before the end of June, I am going to clear this table in the database so this function is handling less data. The last time I cleared it was about two years ago when we started having issues with all the 500 Errors, as I thought this was what was causing it (unfortunately it wasn't the cause - TPG was, go figure!).

Clearing the stale data from the table will speed things up a little, as data from idle members won't be cycled through the loop.

In the weeks following this I will rewrite the highlight update feature in ASP.NET, which should solve the problem in its entirety as ASP.NET works at up to 6,000 times faster than Classic ASP, given that ASP.NET is a compiled environment rather than simply a scripting language. To see the difference in speed, navigate through the static content on the white VR site pages.

The trick is writing code that works. Watch this space.

Okay, due to me getting a 500 Error when making the previous post, I've decided to clear the thread highlighting now. Things should be much better now.

Yes Brad so it seems! Thanks!

This has been an issue for a while now, so thanks for fixing it.

I was thinking you could also delete everyone who has 0 posts, but there aren't many members in that situation.

Accounts can't be closed. Once I get a chance to recode this function in .NET it should permanently fix the issue.

The idle members each had more than 100kB of data in the table. That times 2422 isn't a good size to have running through a loop coded in VBScript.

I would be a idle member for sure.
It's all my fault,,,,I really need to spend less time on computers at nights.
Addictive things!

Pete