This is an update post since we have now completely redone the article section. The issues we were having that were described in the quote above were unfortunately still happening. It had to be a database issue, but I could never find it.I just wanted to do a quick little article to let all of you know what I have been up to with the slow loading Article section of Rc-Help
Over the past few months, something happened to our Article system and it has caused it to load very slow when you clicked on Articles at the top of the forum. I believe I found the reason why the page was loading slow, and I have changed things up to make it faster.
If you click on that Articles button at the very top of the forum, you will notice first that the page is loading much faster. I'm talking down from about a 12 second load time to about 0.1 second load time. Yea, it was that bad. The second thing you will notice is that every time you load the page, or reload the page, the articles will change! No longer is it just a static page with the same thing day after day (especially since I am not making articles anymore... for now)
The Articles section (I call it the /ams section) was not the only section that had this issue. If you clicked on Helicopters in the sidebar categories, due to the number of articles in there, it was loading quite slow as well. Not as bad as /ams, but it was still up there at about 7 seconds. Well, I did the same thing for the Helicopter category that I did for /ams, and it has been sped up as well. Of course, just because I have limited the number of articles that show when you click on Helicopters to 9, ALL articles in that category are still available. And yes, these will also rotate.
Please let me know what you think of the changes and if you have any questions or suggestions to make this rarely used part of the forum better to where people want to come in!
And, I'm kind of starting to get the itch again so......
Because of this, I wanted to move to a new article section. The only issue with that was having to rebuild the entire article section. There are well over 200 articles and just thinking about that was daunting. However I did start it, but quickly realized if I worked hard on the article section, it would just fill the forum up with articles. For this reason, I started only doing a couple a day. Then, it clicked....
Why not just purchase the new AMS that is made for this new version of the forum software.... Yes, it costs money, true, it may not work, but IMO, it was worth a shot.
To my surprise, it seems that the new system has overwritten the database tables and resolved the issues that I was seeing on the old forum. So the new Article section is as fast as the rest of the website, and has all of the information behind the same links as before. So no need to do any rewrite rules to correct broken links. I am very happy about not having to do weeks worth of work.
Please let me know what you think about the new article section. As always, I'm taking suggestions for improvements.
