Whats the Top 10 worst hacks 4 server load?

[bairy]

I've just skimmed the entire thread and there's one thing I didn't see anyone mention though I may simply have missed it:

As well as cpu load, hundreds of plugins will also increase memory load a LOT.
1. The datastore caches all the plugins and the datastore is loaded per pageload.
2. The templates cached will take more memory.


Bashy I don't know if you're still reading this thread but if you are may I give you some fresh advice based on how it looks right now...

The portal is cute. I do like the icons. But:
- Live help? Help for what?
- There's a clock. I have a clock in the bottom right on the taskbar so I'm not sure why that's there. Just unnecessary bandwidth and clutter IMHO
- You might want to get rid of the TAZ review off the front page, it's months old and not really relevant.
- The description of the site is good. Not sure about the need for italics though tbh.
- For some reason it's telling me what my browser is. Is that in case I've forgotten?


Going into the forum itself:
Lets start with the time and size:
vB says: Page generated in 0.61149 seconds with 31 queries
MKPortal says: Page generated in 0.03834 seconds with 6 queries
So that's 0.64 secs on 37 queries.

Including images the index is 168kb big. That's 40 secs on 56k. I hope you have gzip on.

I don't know how many are online. If it's a low number and takes 0.64, lets hope you never get a high number!

Also, it took 18 seconds to actually download and render the index page on the browser, not including graphics.
I don't know if that's down to page complexity or a slow upload pipe. I can download the data for the page in about half a second.
18 seconds on any website is a lifetime. And that's on a 2800+ processor and firefox. Anyone still on a 1.*ghz processor could be waiting up to a minute.
Even Opera (which is uber fast at rendering) takes 14 secs.



Again you have live help and a clock on the left. Screen clutter.

Upon loading the page the very first thing I see is blue bolded comic sans scrolling text.
Yes. I don't see the navbar, the lastest threads info box or anything else. I see scrolling text, and on a scale of 1-10 annoying, it's an 8. And I'm not even sure what's scrolling across. It looks like a list of all the threads...

There's also a second scroller which is telling me something about referring people. Two things:
1. Scrollers are hard to read because they move several pixels in every frame. Buggered if I know why the browsers didn't smooth that out.
2. Why would I refer someone to the site before I'd even seen it myself. If it has to be there, make it a members only fad.


I don't know why people put latest threads and stats at the top. If you really must have it at the top, have it there for members only. Guests don't generally care what the latest threads are before they've seen the forum list.

It's nearly an entire pagedrop to the actual forums and it's 3-4 more to view them all. That's a lot. I appreciate that you have the moderators on and you have vertical subforums and they're making the cell heights taller, but 4 is still a long way down.

The red "warning text" looks horrible on the blue, it's hard to read.


The style's quite pleasant and things are laid out okay. Though I'm really not sure why the page has been mounted inside the MKPortal wrapper, the left bar only goes a third of the way down and is a bit pointless really. I know the intro says there are more side blocks on registration - I hope they're useful.

The lounge looks relatively busy, lets open that:
MKP: Page generated in 0.03706 seconds with 6 queries
Page generated in 0.43833 seconds with 24 queries
Render time: 10 secs.

Loading the countdown thread:
0.7 secs generation
13 secs download + render, and 491k downloaded, including images. I'm glad I'm not bandwidth restricted!

The postbits are HUGE, I mean really really big. And because you have 6 pets too you're post takes up nearly two browser pages. Holy crap!


To give you an accurate idea, even the error page takes 5 secs to render, and there's hardly anything to it! I think it's the MKPortal wrapper TBH.


I haven't gone into the content of the forums or threads any of that, I'm just commenting on the way it looks. If I was visiting your forum, the scrolly text, the enormous scroll on the index page and the relatively slow pageload and very slow render times would make me say "ouch, my eyes hurt and my browser is crying. I'm not visiting here again".


Sorry dude, I applaud your stamina but daaaamn your site is slow