Testing PHP to help speed up the Forums

This newer verison of the bulletin boards has a feature called the “UBB Accelerator”. Normally, the software takes a number of steps before delivering you to the page you desire. When the UBB Accelerator is on, it allows you to skip some of these steps.

Sounds great, right? Here’s the tricky part – for this to work, the software must keep track of which discussions to skip (or you could say, which discussions are “popular”). Building the list of discusison will take time.

While we wait for this to build, the forums will actually seem to “deccelerate” – the most obvious effect is the blank pages that you might encounter when you click on the Last Post links at the front of the forums (these are in the 3rd column)

We are still testing if using the UBB Accelerator is indeed worth our while. For now, please bear with us. If you encounter the blank page, do this: click the back button of your web browser and try clicking on the Forum name of your choice. Then click on the topic from there.

We’ll run the UBB Accelerator at least through the end of the year and then make a final decision then.

Cheers!

What was the decision?

Gus,

Since UBB already uses a mysql database, it might be good for you to use PHPBB instead. Since UBB uses a combination of PERL and PHP to get thing done, PERL tend to be slower than PHP. PHP was designed for the web while PERL was designed to parse text files. I from what I have seen of PHPBB, it's faster than UBB. You might want to consider it as a better upgrade. especially since you are catering to a user base in Taiwan from a server in NJ. You don't need your BB software to slow down things anymore than the distance already have.

Mark

Can Segue do something useful with a tone-number pinyin to unicode tone-marked pinyin conversion script? Over to you, techies, I don’t understand this stuff.