Plankowner
Posts: 9165
Location: Upper lefthand corner of the map. | Subject: Changes to the Naval Historical Center web Pages
Received this from Mike Mohl of NAVSOURCE.
For those of you who go to the Naval Historical Center this is the reason the service has gotten so bad.
Chuck Haberlein is the director of the site.
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Folks,
Rear Admiral DeLoach came to see me this afternoon, reporting that
(prompted by the piece in "Navy Times", and a deluge of other
complaints about the extreme slowness of the Naval Historical Center
website) he had a serious heart-to-heart talk with the folks who have
been hosting the site since its earliest days. They told him that
nothing could be done to improve things at their end, since the
problem is that there are too many image files on the site, and they
are clogging up the works. As many of you know, I have my own rather
strong views on what actions probably brought on the server's slow
speed (which developed quite suddenly in early May), but the culprits
(if such they are) are most unlikely to 'fess up, so we must act on
the basis of the proffered explanation.
Since the Center is working up plans to relocate the website's
hosting in the near future (hopefully in a month or so), the Admiral
wondered if something could be done to temporarily reduce the impact
of the Online Library on the site's problems, in hopes that
functioning would thereby be improved. (By way of perspective, the
Online Library has more-or-less 85,000 individual files, of which
about 50,000 are image files. It is by far the largest contributor to
the site's file population and megabyte count, as well as to its user
traffic.).
We kicked this can around for awhile, realizing that there is
little benefit to be had in taking down the website's most popular
feature, both in terms of maintaining relations with our
long-suffering patrons, and in terms of the very real risk that Google
and other outside portals to the Online Library's contents would just
de-list us due to the massive quantity of broken links that would
result. The latter would be a real tragedy, as most of our user
traffic comes in via those outside portals. On the other hand,
maintaining the NHC site's current glacial access speed is also not a
viable option, since hardly anybody can use it unless they possess the
patience of Job.
Finally, after mulling over the options, we reluctantly decided to
pull out the Online Library's large JPG files (amounting to about
25,000 in total), in the expectation that this would greatly reduce
the site's overall file population, and also the amount of
server/cache capacity that is in use (Those JPGs probably represent
60-70% of the sites total megabyteage.).
This will leave all the Online Library's content pages (HTML
files) and all of its thumbnail images intact, so reference
capabilities and all of its internal and external subject links will
remain as before. However, clicking on the thumbnails will not bring
up the larger JPGs, as they won't be there anymore. We expect that
this action will improve the speed of the entire website enough to
make it useful.
I want to stress that this is a temporary expedient, with an
expected run of a month (or, in a worst case scenario, until the end
of 2008) pending reestablishment of the website at another hosting
facility, one that will have much greater inherent server and
bandwidth capacity, and which will be far more robust that our current
(and increasingly unviable) host. Naturally, there is money involved,
which has been the root of much of the problem to begin with, but that
issue has apparently been laid to rest.
At this point, I have removed all the larger JPG files for the
"80-G" series images and some other much smaller collections.
Beginning on this coming Tuesday, I will pull out the JPGs for all the
other number series, taking out the "NH" items last. I will monitor
the site's running speed as I go, and, if I see a marked improvement
in running speed, may leave the "NH" JPGs alone (those being the core
of our own collection). However, I don't really hold out much hope
that this will be the case, so you should plan on the disappearance of
all of the large JPGs during the course of the first week in
September.
A suitably garish message, summarizing the actions taken and our
hopes for the future, has been added to the Online Library's front
page, and to the NHC Photo Section's introductory page.
Again, as many of you know, I designed the Online Library to
survive just about any conceivable administrative action or physical
disaster. To this end, it exists locally in a fair number of PCs and
external drives. Therefore, reconstituting it will not take long once
we have a viable host in place.
In the meantime, I would appreciate any feedback you care to offer
concerning whether or not you are seeing improvements in the running
speed of the NHC Website as a whole. You are also free to pass the
message along to any other Online Library users that I have omitted
from my list of addressees.
Chuck Haberlein
http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org11-2.htm
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Changes to the Naval Historical Center web Pages
