I think we found our limit ..

[RIgnazio]

even though ChiefDelphi is a good community, I would like to invite others to join It's Technical!, found at http://technical.aceshigh176.com

It's Technical! is a support site for the FIRST robotics community that covers everything including pneumatics, electrical, programming, etc.. It also includes information for vEx, FLL, EDU/Robovation, etc..

It's Technical! is a subsidary of Aces High 176.

Stop by and open an account today!

[Mike Martus]

As Brandon has said we are taking steps to handle the extra load for now and the near future. The timing is not great but we have been working on the upgrade for awhile and are solving several roadblocks along the way.

As Brandon has said, he is the MAIN man I am only an ad visor or sorts not the expert by any means. I have diverted his energy as of late by making the site self sufficient in terms of funding. This energy could have been spent making improvements. I am looking toward the future and it was a MUST make it now activity.

We (Brandon) will work his usual magic in the coming rush of traffic and if all plans fall into place we will be faster and stronger to carry the load the Community of FIRST is in need of.

Thank you for your continued support. We will do our best!

As far as offers to have free or reduced rates on another systems..... there is much more to the site than just moving. Much of the site is custom written and changing locations is not a easy or speedy task. It is also very risky this close to the FIRST crunch.

Again, a special thank you to the Community of FIRST.

[Mike AA]

Originally Posted by Mike Martus

As Brandon has said we are taking steps to handle the extra load for now and the near future. The timing is not great but we have been working on the upgrade for awhile and are solving several roadblocks along the way.

As Brandon has said, he is the MAIN man I am only an ad visor or sorts not the expert by any means. I have diverted his energy as of late by making the site self sufficient in terms of funding. This energy could have been spent making improvements. I am looking toward the future and it was a MUST make it now activity.

We (Brandon) will work his usual magic in the coming rush of traffic and if all plans fall into place we will be faster and stronger to carry the load the Community of FIRST is in need of.

Thank you for your continued support. We will do our best!

As far as offers to have free or reduced rates on another systems..... there is much more to the site than just moving. Much of the site is custom written and changing locations is not a easy or speedy task. It is also very risky this close to the FIRST crunch.

Again, a special thank you to the Community of FIRST.

Mike,

Seeing that it is the time of the year where CD gets the most hits wouldn't be the best time to do a move, I know that the whole moving isn't as easy as transferring files, its also about reconfiguring and all that great stuff. That is where/why I just crawled CD to see how much it really needs and what my servers need to run the site. Could be why my ip is listed as #2...

MY offer was a little late in the year ( early in the season). But it was just an idea which I thought of that would help with the costs to your team and hardware issues. Each year FIRST grows and being that Chiefdelphi is one of the most used websites it will need to grow to allow for all the new users to get their fix of FIRST.

-Mike

[Venkatesh]

How about using the Squid cache in http-accelerator mode on Mike's server? That way, you can leave the current configuration in place and take advantage of both extra bandwidth and reduce processing when people are dealing with both static elements and threads which haven't been touched in a while. And the configuration of that is a lot simpler than moving servers.

To balance load between any number of volunteer caches and the primary server, you could us one of many load balancers (pen, plb, etc.) or round-robin DNS. Then each cache server would run squid and set itself to be caching chiefdelphi.com. When the squids can't serve requests, they will pass them back the the current server.

That might help some with performance.

[Brandon Martus]

I've done some tweaking in robots.txt to disallow the spiders from indexing the site (at least until the Summer). It's a tradeoff that I normally wouldn't like to make, but I'd rather save resources for you guys than for Google, Yahoo, Alexa, etc.

The site is still 100% searchable via the site's search (up top) and will remain in Google/Yahoo/etc for a while before it falls out. Hopefully by then we will have our server upgrade and/or it will be May and I'll put the old robots.txt back up.

I'll also be toning down some of the 'perks' like I did last year. There are a few settings and features that are better left disabled during high traffic. The boards will still be useable, but may be missing some of the nice little extras. (You won't be able to see who is viewing the thread, etc.)

-Brandon

(you will probably still see 1-2 'Spiders' listed on the 'Whos Online', because some are recognized, but may not adhere to the robots.txt standard. 1 or 2 is better than 50-60.)