I maintain The Fire and Ice Archive, which is www.dracoandginny.com. It's an HP fansite dedicated to the non-canon pairing of Draco Malfoy and Ginny Weasley. I've got a lot on my plate so I haven't been able to dedicate very much time to the skin design. (Or in other words, excuse the ineptness.) We currently have 8850 members, which grows about 20 per day.
This week I also uploaded another instance of eFiction to classics.dracoandginny.com, a site dedicated to thoughtful fic recommendations, using Tammy's Recommendations module. Again, the skins could use some improvement in design, but we're still working on artwork for it. For this site I've taken out most everything but a link the recommendations, since I want it to feel more like a traditional website, but to have the ability to browse by category, rating, etc. The Recommendations mod came out right about the time I was investigating software, and it seemed perfect for a site completely for recommendations!
Oh I love FIA! It's an addiction of mine. I actually just finished reading a story not 10 minutes ago 😆
Awesome, hope you enjoyed it. I think I saw somewhere else that you also run a site with a lot of members. This could just be our server, but does it take a while for any pages dealing with lists of authors to load at your site?
Hee, I'm also a member there 😆 I only joined a month or so ago (I think? My brain's like a sieve), but I've been a reader there for a little while now. It's a fantastic archive.
Awesome, hope you enjoyed it. I think I saw somewhere else that you also run a site with a lot of members. This could just be our server, but does it take a while for any pages dealing with lists of authors to load at your site?
Yes, I have a problem with that as well. Right now I'm at 8158 members and 1357 authors. Visiting the members page overloads my server and creates database connection problems. The rest of the pages aren't TOO bad, like the authors page and the co-authors field in the submission form loads pretty good.
Yeah, the members page takes a few, but we do have issues viewing authors and I had to turn co-authoring off. That could just be me though, since my internet service isn't the best.
Have you tried setting your display settings to fewer Default items per page? My lists only have 8 items, so only 8 stories show up on any page (except maybe author profiles). The author list still has 24 items on it though, not very helpful if you do too and it still has loading problems.
Maybe you can change your author url in the header menu from
http://www.potionsandsnitches.net/fanfiction/authors.php?list=authors
to something with way fewer results, like the "z" page of authors:
http://www.potionsandsnitches.net/fanfiction/authors.php?list=authors&let=A&let=Z
It's time for the other end of the alphabet to take the spotlight, anyway. 😉
Would that help the load any?
Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
url: https://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction
php: 7.4.33 msql: 5.6.51-community GPL
efic version: 3.5.5 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, tracker, story end, beta, word
It only helps if the letter doesn't have a lot of results. For example, on my archive the letter "b" starts out a lot of pennames and limiting the url to just that letter still kills my server.
I think it might be the way the script loads or gets information from the database. I can't remember having this problem with earlier versions. If I'm remembering correctly, with version 2.x I had around 2,000 members less than I do now and the members page still loaded okay. I mean, 2k members more is a lot so maybe that's it but I didn't really notice any problems until I upgraded to 3.0. Maybe I'll get my hands on an earlier version and see if there's anything different with the mysql requests.
I agree with soundspretty about it slowing down a lot from 2.0 to 3.0, since I noticed that it got a lot slower afterwards too. I wasn't sure if it wasn't just my ISP though - I seem to remember that was one of the really slow weekends (I mean, 7Kpbs!).
The URL change does help a little bit, though.
I wish I had more time to invest in really getting to know eFiction better. I usually feel that I don't really know what I'm doing!
Thanks! They're improving now that I've handed the job over to others.
