My guess go towards Ranking: regardless on OS and browser, it always takes lot of time to open

Cheers and

So did I but i bet nobody cares :( Any way just going to say hello, im just goona run it on my laptop n the evening its cold notw in the UK so I guess the heat generated from it melting should make my dank basement flat nice and warm:) But if I wanted to get involved using something more powerful what could I build at home that would do the job, dedicated machine for say 500$ or can I instal on a remote windows server and run from there? cheers, Leehttp://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/mvnp...ages/emotion/applause.gif

I suspect SNURK will need to have a rethink about the way the stats and rankings are processed/presented regardless of host.

From reading what Heliohost have said it looks like it's the load on the hardware due to generating the stats and the rankings page rather than the bandwidth to display them that's the problem. That is likely to be a problem for any host, especially if SNURK's sig list grows any more.

I'm sure that given time and some suggestions from the folks in the forums SNURK will be able to figure out the best way round the problem.

We remain obliged to you and will wait patiently.

I'm sure those willing to help with server space etc will soon speak up again.

I wonder how many people request a sig and then move onto another project leaving their data online and waiting for the 365-day exclusion limit to be reached. I know that this was discussed before and the feeling was that it would be unfair to boot them simply because they had not been crunching 'for a while'.

If you were to remove these users and send them to limbo (i.e. not deleted but not shown in the lists) would that be enough to take pressure off the server?

EDIT: To explain 'limbo'
You decide on a cut off point for acceptable length of inactivity. Those who fall below this limit are no longer shown on the list (which would become a list of active users). Instead of being shown on the list, their data remains on your database. Their status can be returned to active simply by them doing more research (the fact that they are now active again is enough to move them from inactive/limbo part of the database to the active part).

Looking at the list today, I see that the majority of 'offenders' are at the lower end of the list, but their number is alarmingly high. I would also therefore propose a second strategy to encourage activity (i.e. crunching at WCG). My second proposal would be that members 'in limbo' would not be allowed to use their sig (because you simply stop updating and uploading sigs for inactive users).

This Draconian measure might be the incentive to continue crunching but would also result in much less data traffic to/from the server. It's not meant to be a punishment (because no data would ever be destroyed), but an incentive to remain active at WCG.

If you think that there is merit in investigating such a policy and it produces enough of drop in traffic, I think this could be the basis on which you could propose this to WCG in return for them offering to host. That way, we could keep our sigs, you wouldn't need to worry about hosting problems and WCG would have an incentiviser to keep users active.

I'll voluntarily take my SNURK stats image off my forum sig just now to reduce the load a little. I know it will only be a small help, but it's all I can do to improve the situation in the short term till a permanent solution can be found.