General forum slowness

[Raum]

It's painful. There have been times I've sworn off the forums for weeks simply because they became unusable. Yet I realize bandwidth and servers both cost money. Have you considered hosting an add to pay for necessary upgrades? Something like RPG.net's model, large enough to satisfy the publishers, small and tasteful enough to avoid annoying users. Or at least avoid causing more annoyance than the latency does already.

[Tirian]

They are aware of the problem (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53007). The fact that the side doesn't have ads or some specific tchotchke in the store that would be used to fund improved bandwidth doesn't mean that those ideas haven't occurred to Rich. He's said before that it would still be money out of his pocket, and I believe that he understands the issues better than we do.

If the load is bad, then come back in twelve hours and it will be fine. Or follow your plan of coming back in a few weeks; it's not like you're going to miss anything.

[North]

Or follow your plan of coming back in a few weeks; it's not like you're going to miss anything.

I disagree strongly with this statement. Lots of people hang out on here, so they will miss hanging out with friends. Play by post games can die off from lack of attention. WW Games go haywire if key people dissapear.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I wont complain profusely about the sites slowness. This is Richs playground, and we should all be glad that hes made it available. I use this site a lot and I would like the opportunity to donate towards a new or seperate server, but Rich doesnt want to do that. He doesnt want people to feel like they are owed anything by giving money. I can respect that. Although I would be willing to also buy a cameo in a comic maybe? That way I'm not owed anything and I can put in something to a community I greatly enjoy.

[Zeb The Troll]

I direct you to this post, made by Rich in January of this year.


Yes, we're aware of the problem, though it has only moved from "annoyance" to "crippling" in the last two weeks. The real issue is that we're essentially at the limit of what one server can provide, so we're investigating multiple server options, which are a.) not quite as easy to implement as simply sticking more RAM in the existing server, and b.) much, much more expensive.

One of the possibilities that we are examining would involve splitting the comic to one server and the forum to another, so that no matter how overloaded the forums got, it would not affect viewing the comics. Given that the entire registered forum population amounts to less than 10% of the total audience for the comic, this will keep the most people happy. Of course, even the forum will have better service (theoretically) by not competing with the people reading the comic.

However, don't expect any solution immediately...it will take us a while to get anything finalized. Part of any solution will include funding, which is a tricky issue. Since we don't charge for subscriptions or run advertising, all recurring expenses must be balanced against how many books and t-shirts we sell. Basically, it comes down to the fact that GITP's revenue and expenses are pretty much in balance now, and any large increase in the server cost will throw the whole thing out of whack. A webcomic is not a business that is really flexible with its finances, you know?

What we will NOT be doing is a straight donation drive for the server; in the past, donations have led those who donated to believe that they had a right to demand faster updates to the comic, and that's just not going to happen. More likely would be some sort of low-price additional product whose revenue would specifically be earmarked for "funding the server". That way, anyone who purchsed it would actually get something tangible for their money, in addition to knowing that the server problems will be improved.Emphasis mine.

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff of Moddingham: I probably can't get away with calling it an an undocumented feature, but it's a known issue. Thread locked.