Board Speed

[groan]

Hi all.

I have a question that i hope some of you may have answered for yourselves in the past.

I have a board,  www.battlegrounds.groan.ca
that has 71 forums on it.
It takes forever and a day to load and when you have to hit the home button to reload the page, its a lot of waiting.

what i am wondering is how can i speed things up. I do not have control over the hardware as it is being hosted. I am running this board, and another less used board off the same database.

I am starting to loose people because of it and well, it sucks.
the obvious option to get rid of some of the forums is not an option. so please suggest if you can.
Thanks!
(i am looking into the collapseable categories option, but i am thinking it wont help because i will still need to load all the forums.)

[Jeff Lewis]

Perhaps one of the collapsable authors can alter their MOD so that it doesn't load ALL forums?

[groan]

Does Godai look at this section?!

GOD!(ai)

i disabled the news fader and it seemed to help a bit. can you think of anything else that may help?

[groundup]

well, i dont think that you need all of those boards considering that you have such a small site with not a little of members.  You should get rid of some of those 1st.  

[groan]

i dont know if you have or do play Dark age of Camelot, but each area in the board corresponds to a specific area of the game where low level people can battle eachother without getting wiped out by uber players.
this si also a very new board that i hope will grow alot more.


one option i just came up with is to have an index page that links to each forum individually.

unfortunatly i cant get a board to load only the category without opening them all...

[TheJkWhoSaysNi]

well it doesnt look like you've got too many posts in each category, why not just turn each category into a 1 board?

[Purple Raine]

I agree with what the others have suggested, try cutting down a few of the boards, by having so many boards with 0 or near double digit posts only, you give the users the impression that "this place is dry"... so they don't post... what you could try doing is only have 1 board for each section, where everything is lumped together, and then slowly divide the boards into two / three / or more sections...

That's what I did... and in 1.5 months, my board has gotten over 2200 members and 40000 posts.

Which was the main reason I came into this thread ...

are there other users who have big boards?  I've seen a few other members here for have sites / boards that are much bigger than mine...

and I'd like to know if you've noticed any problems? My board sees about 20-80 people on at any given time, and I don't see that decreasing any time soon (which is a good thing of course), but I really need to find a way to make it suck up less CPU / resources ...

I've noticed that the board is indeed a lot slower than before, and my host has notified me that the board sucks up LOADS of CPU whenever it makes a sql querry (which is very often)...

Because my site is based around my board, if I don't figure out how to make things more efficient in the near future, I may have to go dedicated (which is $$$).

Thanks for any input.

[groan]

if you have a look at my url now, you will see my new index page that has a dynamic dropdown menu taking people directly to the board of their choice.

the only problem is browser compatability of course (when is it not).

i used javascript from dynamicdrive.com (love that site!)   and it did tell me that is was compatable with all browsers but i cant make people turn on their javascript.

i may have to redo it with dhtml(which is what i should have done in the first place)

tell me what you think please!