Attachments Announcement, Please Read

[Laurel]

Hi all,

As part of our efforts to get the forum back up to speed during peak fun times, we are going to implement a new idea for attachments to posts. From now on, post attachments will only stay on the server for 60 days. This means that after 60 days, your message will still be available, but any attached files (pictures) will be removed from the server.

This will only affect files which are uploaded to the Literotica forums, not those that are linked to within the forums. It will not have any affect on avatars. The posts themselves will simply show up without the originally attached files. Everything else will remain the same.

If you have any thoughts on this new deal, please respond to this post. We believe that this action along with several others should help to improve the speed of the forum considerably during certain operations. We also believe that Santa Claus is real and Bill Clinton never inhaled, so don't get mad if it turns out we're wrong.

Thanks for reading, and now for something completely different...

 

[SweetCherry]

Hey! Santa IS real! I saw him at the mall last week! I even sat on his lap and he started saying "Ho ho ho." Then again, that might have something to do with the short skirt and see-thru shirt I was wearing.

Seriously tho, it sounds like a good idea. It can't hurt anyhow.

 

[weathered2]

Hi all,...As part of our efforts to get the forum back up to speed during peak fun times, we are going to implement a new idea for attachments to posts....If you have any thoughts on this new deal, please respond to this post. ...

Yes, but first...I LOVE THIS SITE!!! I haven't had this much fun since I discovered my first erection, (that was a while ago, by the way).

As to attachments, (the FILE kind), will the PMs carry a file name in text as a clue to what was there. Not necessary, but I've seen that somewhere. Could help some of us gueezers, even if the young whipper-snappers don't need it, (there he goes with that @$@% age thing again!). Don't put yourself out. Just wondered.

Oh, and ...I LOVE THIS SITE!!!

 

[MissTaken]

And I love you av!


Ohhhh what a sight!

 

[*bratcat*]

Laurel...

 

[Cheyenne]

Will the link to the old picture be broken automatically after the 60 days, so that the picture can be reposted without getting the message that it has already been posted somewhere else on this forum? After 60 days, if someone wanted to repost a picture but couldn't remember which thread it was posted in originally, it would be difficult to do.

 

[cymbidia]

Great idea, Laurel. After all, 60 days Lit time is, like, 3 years or something subjectively, is it not?

Chey brings up a good point, though. I've posted pics in the body of a thread that i could not use again afterwards. While i accept this limitation, if we *could* have use of the pics again after 60, that would be most cool.

So, just to be clear: if someone had a whole thread called, oh, Piercing Pics, and the thread was a thing they added new piercing pics to on occasion, after 60 days, the old pics would simply disappear and each of those posts would be... empty. That's how it'll work, right?

 

[Fly_On_Wall]

I kind of like this idea cause there are a few pics I want to remove and just cannot find them anymore. and also should someone ever deside to leave lit (parish the thought) they wont' have endtrails all over.

and after 60 days not many people are looking at posts that far back.
sounds reasinable.

 

[Mistress]

Ack, that means I'll have to go back through that long thread/threads and see if I can find any of my pictures just in case I don't have them saved on my comp....

 

[Dillinger]

As part of our efforts to get the forum back up to speed during peak fun times, we are going to implement a new idea for attachments to posts. From now on, post attachments will only stay on the server for 60 days. This means that after 60 days, your message will still be available, but any attached files (pictures) will be removed from the server.

Laurel:

I understand what you're trying to accomplish but I'm not sure this will actually improve things. I could be wrong but I would guess its the recent posts/attachments that get the most usage... deleting attachments from the server will do nothing to speed up the site. What it will do is decrease the amount of long term storage space your servers require - which could be of use, depending on the size of the hard drives you're utilizing. So it might be a good process to implement for that reason but I tend to doubt it will actually do much to speed things up.

Sorry - just my opinion - I could be wrong.

 

[freakygirl]

ahhh jeez.. now I have to go save all the pictures in that long ass "upload feature" thread...

no really.. works for me.. hope it helps speed up Lit.. even tho I don't mind waiting...I'm not addicted.. sheesh STOP SAYING THAT!

 

[KillerMuffin]

Perhaps you could limit the number of attachments a person could upload in, say, a 24 hour period? That would dampen the fun over at the amatuer pic feedback board, true, but if it would speed the server up a great deal. Bandwidth costs some cash and I'd sacrifice the pictures to avoid the whole "Only 1.95 the first three days!" bit, and that's just for the BB.

Another clue is that people searching for a new av could just have it pointed en url to them rather than upload the thing. Most of them have been ripped from the web anyway, why pretend it's your own person creation?

But anything over 60 days old, I doubt a whole lot we be missed except on one or two threads.

 

[OUTSIDER]

Oh well.........I'm gonna go look at my old "Post a pic and add a caption" thread while I still can then.


Bummer.

 

[modest mouse]

Laurel,

Dillinger brings up a good point, most of the older attachments are not being accessed so their elimination does not stand to increase speed sonsiderably.

It still worth a try, at the very least it will free up some stroage space and cut down on clutter.

I would strongly request that some sort of <File Removed Due To Lapsed Time> message be inserted where the removed file was. It will help explain the flow of some of the older threads which were heavily involved in discussing a certain picture.

 

[Renegade]

Works for me since I never use the file attachment thing. Of course, that may have to do with me not being able to figure it out. Heh.

 

[Laurel]

Re: Re: Attachments Announcement, Please Read

Laurel:

I understand what you're trying to accomplish but I'm not sure this will actually improve things. I could be wrong but I would guess its the recent posts/attachments that get the most usage... deleting attachments from the server will do nothing to speed up the site. What it will do is decrease the amount of long term storage space your servers require - which could be of use, depending on the size of the hard drives you're utilizing. So it might be a good process to implement for that reason but I tend to doubt it will actually do much to speed things up.

Sorry - just my opinion - I could be wrong.

Hi Dilly!

Here's our logic, flawed as it may or may not be: the attachments are stored directly in the database, and the table where they are stored has become huge (hundreds of Meg). When a thread with an attachment is viewed, it bogs down the SQL server while retrieving the attachment. Manu said that the majority of "slow queries" showing up in the logs are queries done on this attachments table. In theory, stifling the runaway growth of this table should give us some performance boost, at least when viewing threads where an attachment is involved. As I said previously, and as you of all people know, we're both morons, and there's a good chance we're totally wrong.

Will the link to the old picture be broken automatically after the 60 days, so that the picture can be reposted without getting the message that it has already been posted somewhere else on this forum?

I would think so, and I'll be happy to look in into it before we make any changes.

KM - don't worry, we would never do "$1.95 For The First 3 Days". Now, "$4.95 For The First 5 Days" - that sounds pretty good... The day Literotica starts charging is probably the day the Supreme Court (or the bankruptcy court) makes us.

 

[Siren]

HUH?

 

[Angel]

Ack, that means I'll have to go back through that long thread/threads and see if I can find any of my pictures just in case I don't have them saved on my comp....

Me too. I lost everything when the old computer crashed, so every picture I have is on the upload thread.

Laurelina, when are you going to start deleting? I'm going to search through that thread tonight to get the pics I need back on file at my house

Good idea though.

 

[Dillinger]

Re: Re: Re: Attachments Announcement, Please Read

Hi Dilly!

Here's our logic, flawed as it may or may not be: the attachments are stored directly in the database, and the table where they are stored has become huge (hundreds of Meg). When a thread with an attachment is viewed, it bogs down the SQL server while retrieving the attachment. Manu said that the majority of "slow queries" showing up in the logs are queries done on this attachments table. In theory, stifling the runaway growth of this table should give us some performance boost, at least when viewing threads where an attachment is involved...

When you put it that way there is some logic to it... worth a try, anyway.

BTW - a suggestion I might make to people using the attachments feature once this goes into effect - if possible why not post the link as well as the attachment? This way when the attachment is eventually deleted the link will still be there. This would work, of course, for "hijacked" pics - won't work for pics you're uploading from your computer.

 

[Harbinger]

All I know is the last time there was a major change with the hardware I lost a piece of lavy's chocolate cake. Maybe it's under the table at that database Laurel spoke of. The icing is probably gumming up the works.

 

[Weird Harold]

I don't suppose there is a way to purge only those images that haven't been accessed for sixty (or thirty) days?

There are some attachments that have been up for more than 60 days that get accessed every day -- those in the upload thread for example. The ones that need to be deleted are the images attached to threads that have been dead for a month or so.

 

[Manu]

Hello Everyones!

Hey Dillinger, Mr. D, the D man, etc.!

If the persons who wrote the forum software (it's a 3rd party app) would have just stored links to the attachments in the database, instead of the actual attachments themselves, then this would be a moot point. The obvious way to do it, to me, would be to have a directory where the images are saved and then store a link pointing to that director in the database. I'm not sure what made them decide to store the actual attachments inside the database, but I think it was probably a bad decision from a performance standpoint. Maybe with Oracle, or some super database, it doesn't matter if your tables are 500 gig, but with our database it does appear to be slowing down the system a little bit in certain cases. I don't think this is the magic fix, but we are trying to get a handle on all of the 'little things' as they eventually start to add up.

 

[Dillinger]

OMG!!! Manu responded to me!

(Hey dude... how'd you get all the way up to 169 posts? Obviously you haven't been busy enough running the site! *lol*)

You're right of course... but you have to work with what you have. Hopefully your fix will help.

 

[LukkyKnight]

Oracle

is happy to store images (or other "large objects") as separate external files or internal data, but the horsepower needed to run oracle is not trivial. Think Lambroghini...

If file sizes are an issue there may be utilities to "re-size" them depending on what the underlying architecture is. Removing the images may, in fact, NOT change the file size at all, it may leave a big empty hole in the file (ever watched a disk defragger at work? The two are related...) so I'd try to get their tech folks to cough up an opinion before resorting to an untried solution. It would be a real shame to remove stuff to no avail, IMHO.

Other major performance tweaks come from both disk-caching software and web-server-file-caching software. Depending on your OS and disk-architecture you may also be able to reap benefit from simply re-distributing your files with RAID array tweaks.

Good luck. Database tuning is partly an art, not all formulaic science.

 

[Manu]

Me again!

harold - I think that's a great idea. The problem is that I don't think that data is stored on when each file was last accessed. I'll look at the table and see, but I don't think that data exists.

d-man - 170 posts now!

lukky - Yeah, I've seen some pricing info on Oracle and I think you are correct - it's out of our price range even without the cost of the hardware. As far as the defrag problem, I think that MySQL has some sort of table optimization script that you are supposed to run after removing large chunks of data. We do use a couple of cache systems, one from Zend and one that is our own, and both seem to help somewhat. The forum is so dynamic (ignore lists, new posts every few seconds, etc.) that it makes the caching less effective. On the main site, almost every page is cached. I'll have to look into the RAID suggestion. We use an NFS server but it does not use currently RAID, I don't think. We've talked about it, but for some reason (cost?) we decided against it at the time. Perhaps it's time to revisit that decision in light of the huge growth of the site recently.

I appreciate all of the suggestions and help from everyone. We are still looking at this issue and we're not going to start deleting attachments right away. It should be a few weeks still before we really start to get crazy and maybe by then we'll have a better idea.