features on/off

[eFestivals]

I messed up on Glastonbury ticket day. There's controls built into both the forums and the main part of the site to help manage the server load at busy times, but because I'd set the threshold too high it caused the main server to essentially lock up and for nothing to get served at all to people's page requests in many instances.

If I'd set the load limits to a lower threshold so that I could still access things I'd have been able to manage that load threshold to get the maximum use out of the servers while still managing to serve pages. So for now the thresholds have been reduced, so that this can happen next time there's very high load.

Along with an over-all load limit, there's also some less-important features that could be turned off at times of heavy load to help reduce the load. It's only been possible to do this with forums features up until now, but now i've included that idea in the main part of the website too.

So, when server load goes up to a variety of different levels, a variety of different features get turned off and so disappear temporarily (until the load comes back down).

Examples of these include:-

- the "popular festivals" and "most viewed" tabs of the "latest news" box on the right-hand side of the page (for users of the full website).

- the "more on this festival" links at the bottom of any page that is to do with any festival.

- the "most recent updates..." section at the bottom of any page that is to do with any festival (not yet in place. This will be added within a week from now).

This will help keep the website at its most usable at the busiest times.

So .... now you know why sometimes some parts of a page might disappear.

Edited November 8, 2013 by eFestivals