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Site Update: More upgrades needed
posted by
Patrick Crowley
on
November 14, 2005 at 9:04 am
While yesterday’s upgrades were quite substantial, Cinema Treasures continues to remain rather sluggish.
We had hoped the upgrades would end the slowdown issue once and for all, but it’s now clear we will need to take additional steps to improve the performance of the website so that it can handle the large amount of traffic we’re now receiving.
Until the site is fixed, everyone should expect the website to be slow (or even inaccessible) at times. You may wish to limit your use of Cinema Treasures to evening or other non-peak hours, or even take a few days off from using the site.
As always, we thank you for your support and continued patience. We’ll post another update on our progress in a few days.
Comments (23)
But it’s so damned addicting!!! Seriously, I understand. After my posts today, I’ll take a little vacation from the site. Let us know what we loyal members can do (financially, otherwise) to help with upgrades to the site and supporting server systems.
I know exactly what you mean Ed. It is addicting. That’s why I bought the Cinema Treasures withdrawal patch. Now I only have the urge to log in five times a day instead of six. Ask your doctor about it. :)
I have a question for Patrick. Are the number of “Guests” on this site causing a problem? There are days when I see 400-500 guests online. Suppose they all tried to search for a theater at once? Since they can’t post messages anyway, why not limit them to around 200 at a time.
Every user uses resources on the site.
I believe the biggest problem on the site is the stress on the database.
Every element on the site grabs data from the MySQL db, and in turn causes a slowdown. Limiting guests would work, but I don’t think it would be very inviting, which is what cinema treasures tries not to be.
Yes, Sean is correct on both points, Lost Memory.
1) More users = more traffic = more load on the server.
2) While the heavy load is mostly caused by ‘guest’ users, there’s no way to prevent those users from using Cinema Treasures without impacting the experience for everyone else. Some ‘guest’ users might simply be registed users who are just trying to login or use Cinema Treasures from work, school, etc.
Are you saying that the 400+ “guests” are members trying to login, or are the “guests” using the site for research? I can’t believe that they are members trying to login. When I am on this site, there are an average of 10-25 members max on here with 400+ guests. If the guests were members trying to login, wouldn’t the 400+ guests number decrease and the logged in number of members increase? It doesn’t appear to work that way. The number of guests seems to be a constant number.
I also believe in “the more, the merrier”, but for now the members are supposed to limit their use of the site while a guest could theoretically stay on for hours reading messages if they choose. Maybe I’m missing something here but it doesn’t make sense to me. Anyway, thanks Patrick and Sean for the explanation.
When I’m at work one of the guests is me because my password isn’t saved on that computer and I have no idea what it is.
I never seem to be logged in here until I explicitly log in, and I don’t do that unless I’m going to post a comment. That’s probably true for many of the other ‘guests’ as well.
While there is complications with heavy traffic, isn’t it good to know that Cinema Treasures is exposing such a large amount of people to a subject that means so much to us members.
Sure does. I came on here last January by accident for 5 minutes. I’m stuck in here and addicted. It’s a good thing I grew up in a historic town and was a history major and love doing research.
I posted comments for two theatres today, but neither one shows up in the “Recent Comments” list.
Yes, Ron. That’s not a bug.
When the upgrades are complete, the Recent Comments list will only be updated once per hour. (Presently, it’s only generated once per day, but this will change shortly.)
Recent Comments was actually one of things responsible for slowing down the website, since it was a rather intensive database query which was used on almost every page of Cinema Treasures.
If your a member here and you are also one of the lurkers, I mean “guests” at the bottom of the screen, don’t explain it to me. It might make sense to you but it won’t make any sense to me. And Roger, at the login screen you can click “Forgot password?” and your password will be emailed to you.
ne other problem that I noticed. I tried to do a theater search and received an error. I never saw this error before. It reads “Warning: mysql_connect(): Can’t create a new thread (errno 35). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in /usr/www/users/cinema/www/lib/db.php on line 33”. If I knew where the manual was, I would consult it.
Lost, what I think Patrick means by “guests” is that not everyone of the many members are signed in when they are on the site. For example, you want to check the new messages on some theater on the site, but you are at work, or some computer other than the computer you normally use. unless you sign in, you will not come up as “lostmemory”, you would come up of one of those “guest” people, even though you are a regular user. And most people will only sign in on a “strange” computer if they are going to make a comment, otherwise it doesn’t matter if they log in or not. But it doesn’t really matter, as they aren’t using any more or less bandwidth than if they were logged into their account. Many of these “guests” could be just random people finding the site, but really just picture many regular users all over the country, but not signed in.
….in fact, I was just a “guest” until I noticed I wasn’t signed in, because I cleaned out all my computer’s cookies today, so I just had to sign in. But…..if I wasn’t going to post anything right now, and I just came in to check updates….I would have come and gone here without even realizing, or thinking about signing in, and would have been one of those “guests”….
That’s exactly right, Bway. Thanks for expanding on my earlier comments! ;)
Okay, so your saying that there are 400+ people “goofing off” at work and coming on here as guests. The problem is, those guests are like relatives that come for a weekend and never leave. It must take them a long time to check for new messages because anytime that I login the number of guests that are on here doesn’t change very much. I think I’m going to become a guest for awhile and find out what I’ve been missing. If you need me, I’ll be on the lower left side of your screen. :)
What I also noticed recently, was every time I logged in, it would say “invalid page request” but at the upper left it would welcome me as a member. Clearly a contradiction.
Dear diary, I spent a few hours at the bottom of the screen with the other “guests” today. There isn’t much to do there and it gets kind of boring. I recognized a few people in there. Some of those “guests” are goofng off at work, I wonder if they know that their job is being out sourced to India. As I’m typing this there are 601 “guests” online and 2 registered members. It looks like the 400+ guests are starting to breed down there. There appears to be a nest of them. We might need the help of Sigourney Weaver to eradicate them or at least to reduce their numbers.
Problems today: I posted a message in one theater and it was saved in another theater. Next time I’ll put a staple in it to hold it in place. When I logged in there were 12,286 theaters listed. Right now there are 12,285 theaters listed. The missing theater is named the Rex Theater. This theater has escaped in the past. It is listed as closed and dangerous. If you see the Rex Theater, do not ry to renovate it. Notify your local theater restoration agency immediately. Okay, thats enough excitement for one day, I’ll give you another update tomorrow after I return from therapy. LOL
I’m often on as a “guest” because I don’t log in unless I’m fairly certain that I will be making a comment. For the past several days I have not been able to access the theatre sites at all- for every name I type in I eventually get the “Oops! Name not listed” message, even with common names like Warner and Strand. I hope that you can fix what ails CT so that Members and Guests alike can breeze thru the site as before.
Unfortunately, I also have been having the same problem for the last week as Ron stated above. You can put a theater as common as the Chinese Theater, and it says “Ooops, Name not listed”. The site seems to have more problems than it did before, hopefully it will all be worked out.
I see the kinks have been worked out but there’s only like 4 new theaters in the “new” section. I know we all took a break but I’m sure the hardcore folks have a bunch on the backburner or are in the process of bombarding us with new ones. Right?
It still seems kinky to me. Everytime I try to do a search to see if a theater is already listed on here, I get the “Too Many Connections” error. Maybe it’s my computer. My Commodore 64 has been acting up lately. It could be time for me to upgrade to something faster like a 486-25 with Windows 3.1. Seriously, posting a comment is an ordeal and adding theaters is next to impossible. Maybe if you login at 3am it’s possible to do these things but not during the daytime. The only two pages that I get without errors are the Main Menu and the Theater Guide page. I have seen the Theater Guide so many times recently that I have it memorized. :)
For me, the site is barely functional over the last week.
Hello,
i was wondering if anyone knows who owns or operates the VOGUE THEATRE loacted at 6675 Hollywood Blvd. I’ve been trying to reach the owners for some time now with no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m very interested in the property which would be used for live children theatrical shows based on a series of characters I have created. I think some fun “THEATRE” style events on Hollywood Blvd. would do it some justice…..Thanks!