I've just spent the past 3 days (and 20+ hours) optimizing the site to increase performance and speed. Unfortunately this required me to spend most of my Saturday working on this, however it was definitely needed since the site was starting to get real slow and the SQL Server kept crashing due to so much database strain and I wasn't going to put something like this off to the side. I'm sure everyone has noticed the huge increase in site speed (note: the RGR game pages were taking up to 5 seconds to load before, now they're well under 1 second - in other words, about 10 times faster).



All games are free for the next few days
That's right, all games are free to play for the next few days. I'm making some DB changes and therefore I can't allow any data to go to or from the DB that involves purchasing or selling games. This means that while the games are free to play, you wont actually be purchasing them when you go to play them. Also because of this, you currently cannot sell your games that you have.

For those who are tech savvy, here's exactly what I did: Currently I have 1 DB table dedicated to keeping track of all the games that every user owns. The problem with this is that there's over 300,000 rows which means that every time a user goes to a Game page, it has to search through all of those rows to see if the user owns the game. What I plan on doing is making a table for each individual system. One of the reasons why the game pages are a lot faster now is because I removed the script that searches these rows, just until I've got a DB table for each system. I'm hoping to have everything taken care of by Monday, which means games are free until probably around Monday.



Improved RGR Search
A lot of Google Bots would get stuck or lost in the RGR Search engine which would cause a little strain. Basically they'd end up on pages that would display no results. Here's what I did to prevent this:

When you go to search for a game, Tetris for example, the systems that have the game 'Tetris' would be clickable and let you view only Tetris games for whatever system you clicked and all other systems are dimmed but if you click them, it just takes you to the system but it wont try to display tetris games for that system since the dimmed systems don't have tetris games; same thing applies for the letters.

Another nice new thing I've added was that if your search results return nothing, the RGR will try to make a recommendation. So for example, lets say someone tried searching for Pokemon games for the Atari 2600, since none exist, it would give you recommendations of Pokemon games for other systems.

This also increases my Search Engine rankings since Search Engines will be finding and displaying good pages in the RGR instead of bad pages with no results.



Other Optimizations
I did optimize various other pages which included the Message Center, RGR Pages, Index, and a few other things.

I can't believe there hasn't been a party in this thread
It's great to see that you've been able to optimise pages instead of having to upgrade the server just yet.
Hopefully by the time you've done all the optimising possible you'll be able to afford an upgraded server or there would be a slight problem.
Also the other day I was looking in online users and saw about 5 times more google bots than usual. Is there any reason for that, or did they just like vizzed at that time?

I COULD GO SUPER SONIC, THE PROBLEM'S CHRONIC

reference to how fast the speed is, it is marking my return of being more active here since I won't spend so much time waiting for a thread to load.

Thanks David for at least NOT do what most other forum owners do with these problems (ignoring it) and actually went on and trying the find out what the problem is AND fixing it

joebab : They're back again. The reason they originally went away is because I went to Google Webmaster Tools and reduced the number of bots (for just a few days) but than it resulted into only 1 or 2 at a time and bots index pages for Google Search engine which increases my search engine ranking so I don't want it to low but I also don't think I need it as high as it is right now (which is like 50-75). I'll try and get that number down to like 20-25 because they do cause strain, not a ton but it adds up.

Didowe : I put Vizzed at a pretty high priority in my life unlike a lot of forum owners out there - I do have a few more things I plan to do which will optimize the site even more, spending 20+ hours to make the site faster is worth it considering the fact that upgrading to a new server or database server is really expensive and time consuming.

Question, will the retro game room act like when one isnt logged in, ie let you play free but not make saves, or will it still create save files and anyone that wants to access those saves just has to buy the game afterwards?

DarkHyren : Good question. Yes it still loads your user information and will let you use save files. Basically all the features are still available except buying and selling games.

Good stuff. I'll have to look around for something that interestbs me since I haven't been to the RGR in a while. Got another question for you- does this include the Retro Toons as well? I assume they're both connected in a way that if something affects one it also affects the other, but I wanted to confirm it.

Good question cyro, I think they are probably in separate tables but it depends on how david made it I can't remember. Most likely it is only the RGR that is free for a few days I dont see why RTR would be free there are probably a lot less rows in the RTR. Thats just my guess unless David wants to do the same for the RTR.

Cyro Xero : Nope it doesn't include the RTR. The RTR actually uses old code that the RGR use to use about 6 months ago, will need to update that one of these days.

JigSaw : Yeah there are far less rows in the table for the RTR, no need to do the same.