Do you miss something on BrainKing.com and would you like to see it here? Post your request into this board! If there is a more specific board for the request, (i.e. game rule changes etc) then it should be posted and discussed on that specific board.
Fencer: Well, the way to do it is to have a master and one of more slaves. Read access can be done from any slave (or even the master), updates go to the master. So, someone reading the boards would only query a slave, and only if you post something, you need access to the master.
But this really only works if it's ok to get data that is a little out of date - which isn't the case for BrainKing. You certainly don't want to go to a particular game and get the position after the penultimate move. So you want your slaves to be "close", which either means decidated high-speed lines (unlikely to be affordable for BrainKing), or having the slaves on-site. But, if it's the Internet that is the problem, having slaves on-site isn't going to solve anything.
I work for a company that makes its business on the web as well. We're much bigger than BrainKing. The only way we can deal with the massive amount of traffic is to make use of hundreds of database slaves. But they are all on-site. The network has never been a bottleneck - the database is.
AbigailII: Of course, if brainking were a graphics heavy site, it could benefit from having the images served from elsewhere. But I don't get the impression the graphics takes that much traffic wise.
AbigailII: Actually, during a game, images can represent most of the abndwidth... and I know they should be cached but the fact is, many times they aren't (for instance, I have my browser set to display only cached images for BK, but sooner or later they go out of cache, either because I browse other pages or simply because some of them are very infrequent, like some positions in Backgammon or Chinese Chess, for instance). And some people simply disable cache altogether (I could really never understand why, maybe as a desperate measure to save disk space?) So, a mirror image server might be easier to accomplish and definitely easier to manage... as it is, images are already served from a different server...
Anyway, Fencer will know if the images represent a reasonable percentage of the bandwidth to figure out if this could be worth exploring or not...
(скрий) Ако чакате да направите ход, чукнете на "промени" в съседство с "опресняване" на главната страница, после нагласете на 30 секунди за да видите по-скоро кога сте на ход. (Servant) (покажи всички подсказки)