So we’ve been work­ing a LOT on the GameCore docs as of late, mak­ing good progress, but the more of us that end up work­ing on the docs, the slower the site has been. Which con­sid­er­ing there’s only a cou­ple of us was some­what disturbing.

Turns out that we had been using a mal­func­tion­ing so-called ‘ajax’ menu dru­pal mod­ule for the left-hand book nav­i­ga­tion. Basi­cally for every-single page view of the docs site, the mod­ule would com­pile a list of lit­er­ally every sin­gle ele­ment of every one of the books that we had in the documentation.

Our SQL server was basi­cally hav­ing a fit because it was being ham­mered with queries — to give you an idea of what exactly the out­put of this was: the sin­gle html line con­tain­ing the book nav­i­ga­tion was upwards of 197 THOUSAND char­ac­ters wide.

LOL

So, need­less to say, we dis­abled that mod­ule, and hey look at that, server load went down to, oh basi­cally noth­ing as a result.

The good news? Well, the GameCore docs site is much faster now, and all of the sites (includ­ing this one) that are on the server (ones that access the sql server, which is most of them) should be much snap­pier as well.

Great fun.

Just installed a new gallery — it’s pretty cool if I must say so myself:

View Gallery

Just fin­ished migrat­ing the site to our new ded­i­cated server setup.  Things should be sig­nif­i­cantly faster than they were pre­vi­ously, which in turn, makes it eas­ier to post / update things as well.  More news soon!

Removed a bunch of plu­g­ins that I wasn’t using on the site, should hope­fully speed things up a bit.  We’re going to be migrat­ing our sites from our cur­rent co-loc host to a new one in the next week or so as well, so that should (if all goes accord­ing to plan) make a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment on the over­all per­for­mance of things.

More about that later…