I'm aware of the issues and I have been working on this for the last couple of days...There seems to be a SCSI controller problem....Working to resolve.

Been through this so many times. Ad revenues keep coming in. People donate and things never change. Where does the money go? It's been this way for years now.

I've been following car forums for close to 20 years now. Many site admins saw their forum as a way to make a little money like Facebook endorsers do. Not a single forum that started charging is still in existence. The only one that survived went back to free and another has a tiered membership that exposes rights (eg the ability to post and reply to for sale topics vs read only for non paying).

I'd hate to see the forum shut down as it is a wonderful source of information. But until the owners tell me what is wrong and what it takes to fix it my pocket book stays closed.

Software has no moving parts. It doesn't wear out. It does get rotten (ref "windows rot" where Windows slows down after years of cumulative updates but the same version with updates remastered is fine) perhaps something as simple as rebuilding the existing os and fresh install of forum software will help.

In the end after 55 years in the hardware and software business the performance problems here are much more than downrev server as softtware.. Some of you may remember when it ran great like any other responsive forum...

Ps. The IT department will want you to reboot first.

Really? This hardware is that old that it still runs on SCSI drives?

I have an old 386/25 Dominion desktop computer with 1 Meg of ram and a 5.25” floppy disk if you want to upgrade the server?
Actually, SCSI was/is a very hi level interface system designed to last a long time. Still used today. Quite reliable actually…. Just old.

Parallel scsi died 20 years ago. It was replaced by SAS(Serial Attached SCSI). SAS drives are more expensive but you can use SATA drives on SAS controllers. A SAS controller will easily cost 10x what a sata controller costs and I don't know of any chip set that doesn't include sata.

Yes Parallel scsi was the enterprise storage interconnect. Fiber channel had more connectivity. But if you really have scsi drives they're 20 years old ant not trustworthy

Of those 55 years in computer hardware I built disk drives since 1979. I built the first 1Gb SCSI drive at DEC, We charged OEMs 1000 each. They got what they could. Storage was pricy then. I was a member of T10 the SCSI committee.

I wrote major parts of the SATA spec at Maxtor and Seagate. 8 patents. Built the first fully integrated SATA chip and drive. Later worked on the 5Gb USB3 spec the signaling was heavily leveraged from SATA. Also a major contributor to the USB-C spec. My group did the first working pinout for a no-left or right plus no up or down cable. Just plug it in and it works.

Tony,

Sounds like you have the expertise to volunteer to help with a software upgrade if Brent would welcome the assistance. Ron61 mentioned administering another site that upgraded. He can provide better details, but I don't believe it was very expensive, other than potentially someone's time to actually do the upgrade and database correction, if needed. Like many have already said before, the information on this site is invaluable and needs to be preserved and remain accessible.

Kevin

Sorry. Pass. Never set up a forum. Used them yes. Managed, no. Plus as I understand this is a blade server in some building somewhere far away...

I'm a member of an Infiniti Q50 forum (my daily driver) that runs software similar to this but is more modern and runs like clockwork. It's NEVER down. Given the close similarity in format, I think all of the users here would find using Club Cobra on this software a 5 minute period of adjustment, it's really super similar. Perhaps rather than raising money in the blind, maybe it would be better for Brent to say "It's going to cost $XXXX to migrate the site to this new software, let's all raise the cash to do it." I'd be in on that in a heartbeat. As in all parts of life, it's always best to have a goal rather than a blind theory.

I'll put a link below to the Q50 site, not because anyone here would be interested in the content, but to show what the site looks like and how similar in function and layout it is. That site is rock stable. The software seems to be good.

https://www.infinitiq50.org/forums/

It is unlikely that the software you mention can just simply bolt up to the database file(s) used by this forum. The new software might have a conversion utility but you'd have to check. The good thing about a data conversion is that the new database will have all good tables. I'm going to assert the money spent on any software update will not fix anything except the vendors pocket book and that the update will have the same problems because I think the database is corrupted. Just intuition based on the fact that it seems to get worse and happen more often.

Scsi controllers don't cause software software access violations. Those come from software using a bad pointer.

I will talk to Brent (EM-0785) about his IT tech, maybe helping Brent Mills, since Brent Mills lives in Duvall WA. and Brent (EM-0785) lives in Bellevue WA. His Tech I'm sure is close by too. (30Miles?) I'm here anyway to help. Cheers Tom.

BTW why won't you remove the Keith Craft engines ad that is no longer in business since a few years.

Yes, good point, 'cause "click here" doesn't work.

It is my understanding the forums are being moved remotely to a larger server.


Bill S.

After being down all weekend, service is quick and crisp this morning. I hope this is the start of a new day for the forum. Thanks to all who might have helped make it better.

Agreed! I've never seen it operate as fast as it is now. I've put it to the test a bit by opening multiple thread in tabs and all of them loaded as expected. In the past one or two would have had a connection error.

Fingers crossed the performance holds!

EDIT: Did get a "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19388630 bytes) in F:\Inetpub\wwwroot\clubcobra\forums\network\functi ons_network.php on line 341" error when posting this reply.

Well I will try to post here and see how it works for me now. Everything went well when I was logging in and I hope it stays that way.

OK, I did get the error when I submitted this post.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19388292 bytes) in F:\Inetpub\wwwroot\clubcobra\forums\network\functi ons_network.php on line 341

Ron

Same here, works perfect now. Very fast compared to before.

Seems like we were down for about four days and now back up again. Performance is much improved, lets see how long it lasts ...

Until the "Views" number is correctly represented next to the "Posts" numbers for the threads I think that is just indicative that it will remain broken and the leaks just become cumulative over time. I remember when we had the massive crash a few years ago that resulted in a multitude of smaller problems, many of which were never solved, and the Views/Posts values is but one of them.

From my last post:

https://i.imgur.com/ngw21L3.jpg