A Search Robot that uses Netscape?

No it is probably the Netscape searchbot or a third party searchbot that pretends to use netscape.

I can't upgrade to 7.6.  You've used session variables to count active users and we don't want to go that route.  I'm worried about the memory it will take as we grow. 

I will download 7.6 and update the appropriate code though.

Besides, it is time our version diverged from your version anyway.  We are going to need to heavily customize our forum and trying to keep our mods and your upgrades in sync is going to be a pain.  Most upgrades will overwrite the mods we plan, so upgrading becomes a nightmare.

When you come out with an update, we'll probably just apply changes you made as if it were a mod.  Overwriting files will not be an option by the time we are done.

Don't get me wrong.  Your forum software is great.  We just intend on doing things that were not intended to be done and that an average site would never need.

BTW, I finally scraped up a few bucks and will be buying a license soon.  Another satisified paying customer.

 

We plan on and are working very fast to get thousands of similtaneous users.  We have lots of interesting things in the works that will make our traffic huge.  Some of those things will cause traffic surges during certain large events we will be involved in. (I can't say more until we lauch certain things, but let's just say when we do our traffic will be huge.)

Also, we made it so that Active Users is tracked site-wide instead of just in the the forum area, so Active Users get hit many times as people go through the site.  You may have noticed we created a universal login on our website that allows people to login from anywhere and have tied our newsletter subscriptions to member accounts and the forums.  Everything is totally 100% integrated.

Considering the volume of traffic we are anticipating, do you still suggest we go with 7.6 and the application level variables?

In my opionion application level variables may still be better, as 1000's of users reading and updating the same database table will be quite a database hit, with the delay of connecting to the database, retuning the database across the network etc.

With an application level array there isn't the database hits which would be around 3 or more per user for each page to keep active users up-to-date.

Although an array stored at application level will be using memory all the time even with 1000's of users this would never be more than a few hundred kb of server memory and you gain performance as you don't have the delay of database connections which do use up allot of server resources.

Someone did some tests with the new application active users compared with the old database way on SQL server and came back saying that their tests found that the forum ran at 60% faster now with the application level active users.