Site Maintenance - Ongoing Until resolved

[Big_Mark]

Hi all,

Pete has tasked me with sorting out the site performance issues.

I am an IT guy but not a web site guru so this may take some time to fix.

Why is this happening?

The main issue is image uploading, the site server only has so much storage, when photos are uploaded from mobile devices or not edited, or compressed before uploading, they consume lots of disk space, when the disk fills up the server stops serving 

 

What can you do?

If you are able to reduce the file size of the photos you upload here please do so before uploading them.

PhotoShop "lite" (I believe this is free on PC) is a great tool for this purpose, yes it's a pain in the A** but so is this work I'm doing, any help is appreciated!

 

What am I doing?

I upped the server disk space to stop the bleeding and get the site back up, next I will work on a script to resize the uploaded images so we can get the disk size (and monthly costs) down.

 

What to expect:

The site may be unavailable at times. This may be due to me taking it offline while I am working on these issues, outages will be unannounced.

 

Why this matters.

Pete is paying out of pocket around $30 a month, upping the disk space bumped it up to about $50, I am pretty sure Pete doesn't have a money tree in his backyard, so we all need to respect his investment here.

 

This is a FYI only,

if any of you happen to be Linux web admins please reach out to me directly, maybe you can help sort this out faster.

 

Peace!

 

Mark

 

[eaglescout526]

Thank you Mark! 

[89 MJ]

Thank you for your work Mark!

[AnotherOldJeepGuy]

Thanks @Big_Mark!  I have done some image file trimming but I'll try to trim more.  I use a software tool that is extremely user friendly for windows called Faststone Capture.  It is not free but it is $20 for a lifetime license.  It is great for resizing as well as simple annotation.  (I am not affiliated with this software other than being a satisfied user for a very long time!).

[Salvagedcircuit]

Thanks a ton @Big_Mark!

I use irfanview that has batch image processing. that includes resizing, change compression, renaming etc. It works wonders and is free.

I am totally for a sticky'd banner / dedicated thread post about contributing to comanchclub operating costs. I don't mind contributing to a PC / server parts / operating cost fund.

Is comancheclub is self hosted? I self host and it is incredible what you can pull off with a modern PC, 10g ethernet and fiber internet. Granted, you have many users here and this will likely not work with your traffic.

800x600 resolution would be awesome to achieve, the 600x450 resolution limit is restricting at times and may be off-putting to new members.

There are a lot of great server hosts out there. Digital ocean, linode, namecheap etc... Maybe its worth it to do a price / performance comparison with the current host.

[Eagle_SX4]

Thanks for getting the site back to functional.

 

The biggest thing that can help cut down on photo size is cropping out the useless back ground in photos. Also cropping can be done on any device with any basic editing application. It can cut photo file size 5x smaller or more. Then the pics don't get as compressed when uploaded and the important parts of the pic are much clearer.

[Pete M]

honestly I wouldn't worry too much about the size of images (although cropping is an excellent idea!), we had a great bit of code that was doing it for the last few years automatically and I'm super hoping that we can figure out why it stopped.