Slowness

[Keiji]

Is anyone else finding this site really slow? Sometimes it times out or gives SQL errors, too =\

[H. V. McIntosh]

Now and then slow, but not uniquely this site. A real nuisance, however, (and also at the LifeWiki) is that it asks for a new login for every activity - page change, preview, submit, and so on. The SQL may be failing, Megacable (our ISP) may be switching addresses continusly, or whatever. But the problem is worth looking into. It has already happened four times while posting this reply!!

[Keiji]

Well, I don't get any login problems, so it sounds like that's your ISP. But the slowness/timeouts/SQL errors are definitely due to the server hosting this site =\

[Nathaniel]

Yeah, my hosting people like to be a bit useless on weekends every now an then. I'm looking at other options, but unfortunately the site uses a lot of both ASP and PHP, which isn't an easy combination to find hosting for.

As for the login prompts, I can't imagine that it's a server issue (certainly not an SQL one). It sounds like your cookies aren't saving properly for some reason.

[Keiji]

Yeah, my hosting people like to be a bit useless on weekends every now an then. I'm looking at other options, but unfortunately the site uses a lot of both ASP and PHP, which isn't an easy combination to find hosting for.

Have you considered porting the ASP to PHP? Unless you use some sort of vendor extensions (not that I know what kind of these ASP has) it should be one-to-one so fairly trivial (albeit tedious).

[Nathaniel]

Have you considered porting the ASP to PHP? Unless you use some sort of vendor extensions (not that I know what kind of these ASP has) it should be one-to-one so fairly trivial (albeit tedious).

Most of the code would be reasonable (though tedious, as you mention) to port over to PHP. The tricky part would be the image generation and file saving scripts that are used by the Java applet.

[Keiji]

For writing text files, file_put_contents is really all you need.

For images, I personally write the bitmap data to a raw file then use imagemagick to convert it to a PNG. I wouldn't know how to do animated GIFs in this way, though.