It's been a short week, but have made a few big strides!

Optimization was the name of the game this week.

As you guys and gals know, our sites haven't been as happy as we all would like them to be lately which is due in part to alot of things, but which has raised

a very very large red flag.

Now on to the Updates:

1. We learned a little bit ago, for all you .net web developers out there, that when you use an SQLDataReader that it does not get closed naturally after it is done doing a databind rather it holds the connection to the database open until the garbage collector comes by and does the proper actions for the datareader.  Well, This fix took me a while!  I went through all of our Wincustomize based code, which as you can imagine is large and made sure that all instances of SQLDataReader are opneing and closing the datareaders in a proper fashion with the proper exception handling to wrap around each code block.
2. One of our developers emailed T-man and I today with something he has seen us do alot of which apperently isn't the most effective way to page through mounds and mounds of records.  Take for instance our Marathon thread, for quite some time now the thread has been unreadable and unmanageable on our part because the query to populate that bad boy has just been flat out painful.  Well, with the suggestions by Alberto, we have cut that query down to be over 6 times faster now than before, and although still not as fast as you guys want, it does the job much more efficiently and most of all doesn't take as much server processing to complete!
3. Our database that is currently serving up articles was very dependant on our huge master DB for information, so, if the master DB was slow in responding, articles would also be slow to respond obviously.  Well, we thought it over, and the articles DB should be independant of the master database in such a way that if the master were to go down, the community should be able to still browse articles in most circumstances, well, we have made a large stride in doing so which didn't take much time at all.  Basically, T-man setup replication on a few tables from the master DB to be copied over to the Articles DB so if need be, it can run the forum lists independently.  All i had to do on my part was change some queries so that it would no longer look at the master for some information, but would look locally within it's own DB and now things seem to respond much better.  We will see just how well.
4. I assisted Andrew_ in the forums he is writing that will soon be up for public use.  I wrote some cache callbacks for him so that when a forum listing expires from cache, it will refresh itself so that the next user will get a "faster" copy of the data and not have to wait for a call to the database.  I also did cache callbacks for the subtopic dropdownlists, and the forum bookmarks.
5. BUG: User was able to obtain the "Admin" Honorific!  Little rascal, well, i make a check to see when you change your honorific, the code checks to see if you have the proper access and if so, gives you the honorific, else, STOP HACKING THE SITE!   

Yes, if you can see i had my DBA hat on this week, well for the last few weeks profiling and such to see what is bringing down our sites.  This weekend will tell alot about the strides we have made this week.  Let's just now cross our fingers and hope for a solid weekend of sites running the way they were first intended to!

Have a great weekend all, and i don't have any good jokes, but APRIL FOOLS ANYWAYS!   

Peace out

Flyin