Experienced a couple of blank screens this morning and when I checked to see how many people were active it stated 6 X members and 2 X visitors for a total of eight at that moment. Odd that we are experiencing this sort of thing with so few people actually on the forums. When you consider the larger numbers participating on forums such as ARC where the numbers are sometimes in the triple digits it is puzzling to experience time outs with so few people on the forum.
As far as timing out though, let me just say that as I continue to work with this 42mb 3D model in SketchUp I am experiencing far more time-outs and it is not making my SketchUp experience very enjoyable at the moment.
It seems that the number of SQL server connections is not a one-to-one ratio with the number of people logged in,
i.e. every-time an avatar is read it's a connection, so if you have a thread with 6 to 10 different avatars visible that is
6 to 10 connections right there, never mind the auto-profile checks etc. going on at the same time. There are
tricks shown on the SMF forum board and in the Online Manual that show ways to reduce this activity, and of course
as most of it is written by IT weasels, the directions are opaque rather than transparent. I'm slogging through the
stuff and I will be trying to implement these hints. Of course the bigger question is: why doesn't the forum
software automatically configure itself in this 'superior' format?
See above reference to weasels.