has google gift cards been explored like how they do it realsync? or would that not work?
You wrote in the āDonate to Eroscriptsā thread, that turning on the thumbnails increased the cost from ~70 to 250+. Have you considered turning them off again to decrease the cost? And maybe enable them, whenever you get another donating option ready.
4 Likes
Thatās what she said.
Hi friend! Huge fan of this site, really enjoying the content. Iāve uploaded some funscripts myself. The search feature seems to be disabled most of the time due to site overload? Iām a software engineer and write code for a living. Iām not asking for money or anything, Iād just like to get this site running properly. You may be hit with DDOS attack or just a rogue script gone loose that is accidentally hitting your site constantly. There are open-source packages that we can install into the site to add security features to limit one user from overloading the site. Another thing that is possible is the search algorithm is inefficient and should be replaced with another that takes less resources. Hit me up in a DM or something, I love writing software and making things run more efficiently. Iāve worked on search algorithms before, In my company someone added a nested for-loop in the search code and caused the response of 1000 results to take 20 minutes and hog all the system resources. Using my magical coding hands, I was able to reduce the response time to half a second and take up negligible amount of resources. It only took like 3 lines of code to āefficientizeā it. I suspect something similar is happening in your code.
4 Likes
It would also be prudent to determine which part of the system is experiencing the load. Is it the backend/api? Is it the database? Is it just a huge amount of requests? What kind of requests?
Maybe the frontend has some error in the scripts, causing multiple duplicate requests? Maybe the backend makes a request to a third party that takes time to respond, blocking all the things on this site?
Gotta dive into the code and do some debugging, or add enough logging to avoid having to dive into the code.
this site runs on discourse, so not like we have that much flexibility in changing how it works.
From what I can tell, any time thereās āhigh loadā, itās just moderate amount of users requesting at the same time. Really the only thing to do is just pay for a higher tier VPS server
Thanks for the info. I looked up Discourse. Looks like itās a plug-n-play forum building tool built on Ruby(which in itself is not the fastest language to be working with). However, itās open-source, so anybody can contribute code to it, which means we have 100% flexibility to change how it works, granted they approve my merge requests. I might be able to tweak the search logic so that it doesnāt produce āhigh loadsā. But ultimately, we may be restricted by the paywall.
3 Likes
iād guess any time you see high site load, it has nothing to do with the search, just that more resource intensive features are disabled automatically. But hey, if you can figure out how to make discourse more performant and get your code pulled in, thatād be pretty cool
1 Like
Maybe we should see if turning off thumbnails helps with bad site performance? The site is almost unusable, trying to make even a comment is hell.
6 Likes
This has been my thoughts as well. Ever since the thumbnails, the site has been crippled regularly it seems like. They are nice to have of course, but unnecessary.
1 Like
The performance is really bad some times. I already changed to a no thumbnail theme.
Maybe provide Eroscripts Premium for 9.99 $ a month with exclusive thumbnail theme. If the users want it, they should pay 
To echo otherās sentiments - performance has really been struggling, I feel like Iāve reduced my activity on site as a result. Donāt mean this as a complaint, but more as a data point. I donāt have stats, but it does seem like there is a bit less activity from some of the more veteran scripters, and seems to be a lot more requests being generated or bumps of old topics asking for video sources.
1 Like
I noticed I got the notification for this thread and the regular update email on the same day today - so the former was in my mind when I saw the latterā¦and noticed the email has GIF thumbnails
So - yeah, thereās going to for sure be one of the big bumps in site hosting cost, 16 MB worth of images are being consumed by people who arenāt even on the site, every time they open the weekly email.
Iām kinda shocked that thumbnails havenāt been disabled, and the ability to upload individual images larger than 25kb (the size of a couple of the heatmaps I checked) hasnāt been restricted.
Every other small self-hosted hobby forum Iāve been on in the last 20 years has allowed you to LINK whatever picture you want to link from whatever hosting you had (from Photobucket waaaay back in the day to other more modern options), but your ability to upload and store photos directly on the site was restricted to a ridiculously small size (10-100 kb) or blocked entirely.
Iām pretty sure that the thumbnails are no longer a performance issue, thatās been offloaded to the CDN. Not totally sure what the current bottleneck is, it could just be increased traffic tbh.
Really the only option is to just upgrade to a more powerful server. I can take a look at that later this week.
It was really a combo comment, a combiment if you will, about both whether the site is performant and whether itās affordable to run. =)
Upgraded the droplet. Downgraded my wallet 
4 Likes
Droplet? I had to look that one up. Site is working flawlessly right now. TYVM!
I and others really appreciate it, but we should try to find the solution thatās not increasing the costs for you.
I noticed there is something going on woth notifications - they donāt always refresh properly. I will dismiss them and next time I log in I get the same notifications + some new ones. Maybe itās somehow connected?
My reasoning behind thumbnails was that since itās a porn connected site people might use it in in-cognito mode, so they are not caching images etc. Everytime they open a scripts section they have to download thumbs again and again.
Maybe you could disable the emails with news by default. They probably use quiet a bit of resources when you have to send tens of thousands of them.
Or maybe itās just connected to traffic and you really canāt do anything about it, I dunno.
Btw. site works much better now
Now everything works well, strong lags were always in the evening in my time zone, Iāll check it today. And it seems to me that false notifications are not a reason, but a consequence of the site being loaded.
Even in incognito mode, caching is used. But the cache duration differs. As long as the site is open, it caches everything.
This means only once per session that the images have to be loaded.
For this i only noticed 1 potential issue. Gif files can be several MB in size, and since bandwidth is generaly a big restriction for websites in costs. This might also be the reason it gets throttled (causing everything to be slow).
While it uses a cdn, it doesnt always mean that it cant disrupt the main server. Networks generaly still have limits. And if both are handled on the same network (and share traffic limits for that reason), this can still be an issue.