Cleaning House

So, I think, and there seems to be a reasonable consensus in the Help Desk, that it's time we started looking to cull some of the features of dubious use here at WF, if only to help organization, let alone speed and responsiveness.

Here's a list of what I think should be removed entirely:

• Social Groups
• Friends
• Calendar
• Final bits and pieces of the old gallery - dump whatever image contents remain into a downloadable ZIP, host it, and forget about it.

Here's a list of what I think we should review for size limitations:

• Avatars (both pixels and KB)
• Attachments (KB)
• Album uploads (KB)
• Signatures (character limit, allowing images, etc.)
• PM Recipients

And here's a list of stuff that we should probably cull through and remove infrequently used items:

• Smilies
• Post Icons
• Arcade Games

Thoughts?

Agree with most. Avatar sizes I would like to leave alone. Question: do we know is anyone is hosting their own avatar or are all of them being stored here at WF?

The "friends" feature seems to be a fairly common one on this type of bbs. Does it really cause that much of a performance hit?

Smilies definitely need to be culled. As for the arcade, there's only about a dozen of the games that I play with any frequency, tho of course I can't speak for anyone else.

I'm pretty sure most of them are being stored here and worse (at least in my opinion), I'm pretty sure they're being stored in the DB. As are attachments. There's a reason our DB is over a gig in size, and it ain't just because Baba won't shut up. The fewer giant honking blobs of binary data in the database, the better, at least IMO. In a way, it's almost better that they're here, no matter the fashion, because then, certain avatars won't hang up page loads for people.

Friends isn't going to save us any performance, but at the same time, it really isn't going to cost us any real functionality. The more things that aren't required that we can remove, the better.

Well, we can take the attachments out of the DB with a single button click (and a slowdown while it works - I'd guess 15-30 minutes) and put them in the filesystem instead. As that's the least invasive thing to do, with the biggest potential for shrinking the DB, I think we should do that first.

As for the rest of it...

I have no problem disabling social groups and the Calendar, but I don't see the point in eliminating Friends or the old Gallery. I don't think you can turn friends off anyway, and there's no more template hooks into the Gallery. As long as the link is gone, the indexes may be taking up a little DB space, but what's going to slow things down drastically is having the images in the database. Which they're not. If you wanted to reopen the gallery for a week and let people download everything of theirs and/or transfer it to the Albums, I wouldn't object.

Avatar KB, fine (but is there a way to limit it by file size? I don't actually know). Pixels... eh. Album uploads? Is that really a problem? Signature limits are really more of a policy thing. Entirely a policy thing once we take attachments out of the database. PM Recipients? 5 is too many?

Our smilie selection is one of the best on the net. Let's not ruin that. Post icons could use a little trimming, but there's only 1 I can see that should be removed outright. I'll remove the non-working arcade games, but I plan to add more from the rest of the alphabet.

PM recipients because e-mail notifications go out for each. It's not a storage issue, it's just trying to lighten the load on the server.

The album functions as the replacement for the gallery, so I don't think we should kill it outright, but I do agree that we should try to get people hosting their content elsewhere.

The reason I suggested changing avatars is that they're easily the largest part of each page, both in display and physical size.

Okay, that makes sense. Do you have a recommendation for a decent size limit?

That's optional though, isn't it? Ask people to turn it off, then disable it if it's still a problem.

I don't see the big deal about a large display size. It's much more avatar-like than just a little icon that they have most everywhere else.

I don't mind the large display size (though from my personal aesthetics, I think we're edging on the tacky side with the size of 'em), I'm just more concerned with the file size. I mean, hell, yours and mine are each almost 60K, which isn't a lot, but it adds up.

Decent avatar sizes and an extensive smilie selection are pluses to most people who hang at BBS'. Some people even pay for the privilege. I think it's kind of a nice WF bonus that our members have it standard.

"Tacky" is also kind of subjective, isn't it? I dunno.

I mean...is something broken? Because generally it seems better to leave things be if there isn't a problem.

Oh, I know that tacky is subjective, that's why I've no real issues with the pixel size remaining as-is. However, kilobytes are not subjective .

And, come on, the zodiac signs? 9/10ths of the flags? A few of the giant ones? Every bit of text that's displayed has to be checked for each of these things.

Are there PHP profilers? Seems like one would be useful here.

If no one has any objections, I'm going to change the attachment storage type from database to disk.

Will that improve or degrade performance, ya think?

If improved performance results then I think it's worth doing some things.

However, I am slightly concerned that Kyle is just looking for a reason to start tooling around with things.

It will undoubtedly improve database performance and reduce database size. Whether it improves overall performance is murkier, but I'd imagine so.

Worth a bash, then.

K. I'll make a database backup and do it tonight. Hopefully, the only think anyone will notice is that the board will get really slow for 20 minutes or so.

Shiny. The database is 368 MB smaller now.

That's a significant reduction. Well done.

DP

That's a significant reduction. Well done.

DP