Search And Other Site Stuff

We seem to have discovered a bug or inefficiency in Invisionboard’s forums, and it’s pretty serious. At times of high traffic, our iowait times skyrocket, bringing down the entire server. The immediate cure, discovered almost by accident, is shutting off the forums’ search feature, which includes “Get New Posts.” We’ve been doing that on and off for a week, and it’s been working. Otherwise, you don’t get search without a long pause - and you don’t get anything else, either! We don’t need that. We’re researching ways to get around it; reconfiguring MySQL helped a bit. Don’t be surprised, though, if search/new posts disappears during peak times (e.g. weekdays).

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We’re cold and awaiting the replacement of our boiler to finish. Boiler replacement is a real anxiety provoker because the cost is fairly high - $5,000 in this case - and new boilers may last anywhere from 1 year to 60 years depending mainly on how well they’re installed and maintained; and steam heat can be wondrous or horrible depending on how well it’s installed and maintained. Our boiler was installed in 1928 and was in perfect condition, albeit three times the size it needed to be, but the burner itself finally died after a mere 54 years (this explains why most steam companies are gone now). Unfortunately removal of old boiler took much longer than expected, and now we’re in the cold until tomorrow afternoon… and worrying about how good the installation will be! This stuff is HARD and hideously expensive to re-do, and those of you who have been to a bad mechanic or car dealer (nah, nobody’s ever experienced that) will understand that guys can SEEM competent and still make that little mistake that nets you a failed transmission just after the warranty expires.

Oh, well. Back to work… December’s busy season.]]>