I'm sure many - if not all - of you have noticed the ever-increasing lag and hanging on the server. In preparation for the expected new member influx after the launch of the Nintendo 3DS browser, I am doing as many optimizations as I can.

The first major optimization I have put in place is with the Bulletin Boards. These are a popular part of this collection of websites, meaning the related webpages are hit all the time. As more and more threads and posts are added, the server's database has to work harder and harder to retrieve everything for members to view. It was getting so bad that the database would take between .5 and .6 seconds just to show a list of all threads in each forum of the Bulletin Board system. This amount of time led to slowdown server-wide when several members would view the area at once. It would pile up database requests and backlog them. For example, if 5 members wanted to view the Bulletin Boards at once, it could hang everyone and everything 2.5 to 3.0 seconds!

The optimization I put in place is a caching of sorts that keeps track of statistics for each thread and updates them once per hour. This caching takes about 5 seconds to perform, but it cuts each forum load to .03 seconds - about 15 times faster! The side effect of this is that thread information can temporarily be outdated between caches. It seems like a small problem to solve a much bigger one. (From what I have seen, other bulletin board systems use similar methods of lag reduction.)

I've found a few other areas where caching like this can be implemented. I will do so in the coming weeks. Yet, from my tests, this alone seems to solve a great number of lagging issues.