T w e n t y S i d e d

• The first post on this site is dated Sept 1st, 2005.
• There are 1,869 published posts. (1,870 once I hit “publish” on this one.)
• There are 93 drafts. (Posts I started but never finished for various reasons. I really should clean that out someday.)
• There are 61,546 comments.
• There are 58.7MB of images on the site. (That doesn’t actually seem like very much. I keep meaning to use more images. My goal is supposedly at least one image per post, but I forget so often that calling it a “goal” is sort of pathetic.)
• The comments take up 43.2 MB in the database. The posts take up 8.4 MB. That means that together, we’ve written over fifty-one megabytes of text in four and a half years. It also means that comments make up about 84% of the readable content of the site.
• The database export file for the site and all its settings is 55.2MB.

This last number worries me. Most import operations are capped at a measly 2MB. If I ever needed to move to a new host, I’m not sure how it could be done. I often import a copy of the site to my local machine and work on it there. (It’s kind of confusing if I have the local copy open in one window and the real site open in another. I’m always worried I’ll get mixed up and do something destructive to the live one, thinking it’s the local one. I try to use IE for the local one (because the site looks different in IE, even with the same theme) to reduce the chances of this.) I have to alter the settings to my local webserver to be able to import the site data. I need to raise the limit on how much memory PHP is allowed to use, and how long a PHP script is allowed to run. Not all webhosts give you access to those settings. Changing hosts at this point would be a major undertaking.

I feel the site is a little sluggish these days when compared to how fast it was in the beginning. Even when I’m editing a post, refreshing the page takes about four seconds. How much of this is due to the extra traffic, how much is due to the larger database, and how much is just plain old net congestion? I have no way of knowing. My fear is that the performance will continue to erode as the site grows. Eventually the slowness will drive people away. I know there are many sites I’ve stopped reading, simply because they were too sluggish to navigate.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.