A massive flaw fixed...and a hopefully faster server

[Cat333Pokémon]

As you may or may not have noticed, VR has been having all sorts of errors over the past month. The chat has been kicking people off repeatedly due to dropped connections. Pages wouldn't load without reason.

Well, I finally found the cause. If you ever peeked at the VictoryBattles board, you may have noticed that there have always been at least ten people looking at it at any given time. Well, here's what happened:

When we closed down the Floatzel Pokédoptables, I created a very simple redirect script that sent all traffic over to the Floatzel Migration thread. It literally sent every single request to a file in that folder to the thread...including all of the embedded adoptables. People typically had 5 adoptables in their signatures on other forums. On popular threads, said people could get in a little posting exchange and there could easily be 20-30 adoptables in a single page. If it's a commonly-viewed page on that forum, notably the first page of a news thread, it could get hit hundreds of times. Even though it only loads the HTML document and none of the images, that is a lot of views. Every time it loads, the server has to put together the PHP scripting for the migration thread. (Well, caching might make it do that less.)

The thread is 256 KB (262,733 bytes) right now, and it has averaged that for some time...
A given page loads 20-30 adoptables at a time...
That page gets hundreds of hits...
All for a little bad-image X in someone's signature.

As of now, the thread has 1,121,538 views, which you can see here. Every one of those views was 256 KB or less. Accounting for people who didn't let all of them load, that's 250 GB of bandwidth and well over a million times the server had to put the page together and quite a few million MySQL queries.

Thank you, FreezeWarp, for fixing up the .htaccess script to properly redirect all the image calls. Instead of that massive thead code, this small (840 bytes) image I whipped up is called:

[Yoshi648]

Oh wow. Well hopefully this will fix our problems.

[Fubab_107]

Lets hope our problems go away. It's a relief to hear this after the massive crash today. O_o'

[A'bom]

Hopefully we'll all stop being kicked from the chat for no reason from now on. This should speed things up a bit, hopefully.

[Aquablast]

Cross your hand and hope for the best.

[JC]

I hope this works I hate it when I have a refresh issue and being kicked off the chat.

[SK]

Ah, sexy image you came up with there.

Thanks for fixing the problem.

[Shade]

No wonder VR tends to load very slowly. Hope this fixes the speed issue.

[The Spirit of Time]

Personally, I never faced an issue. It was always fast to me.
Of course, what you did was the good for all, so good job!

[Shadow]

Yeah, same here. I didn't exactly stumble upon the errors/crashes which are mentioned over here, but still, what you did will hopefully solve all these problems.

[Quadcentruo]

You know, I have noticed this forum has gotten faster. So far, no issues - as in, I haven't had to hit refresh 5 times every time a page doesn't load or I haven't had to wait 5 minutes for one page to load.

Good job Cat and Freeze.

[Cat333Pokémon]

Originally Posted by The Spirit of Time

Personally, I never faced an issue. It was always fast to me.
Of course, what you did was the good for all, so good job!

Originally Posted by Shadow

Yeah, same here. I didn't exactly stumble upon the errors/crashes which are mentioned over here, but still, what you did will hopefully solve all these problems.

Don't forget, you both are typically on in the dead of night for the United States, which is when it usually when the site isn't being swamped with hits.

[Flare Soru]

I was wondering why that forum had so many people looking at it.
Hopefully this helps.

[Ningamer]

Maybe Lite can stop quadruple posting in the chat now...

I never noticed many problems, but I guess I'm not on when most others are. Still, it's great to hear that you've found a solution!

[Aquablast]

Same here Nin and only sometimes that the server is down.