ROMdb β Playing is overrated

At the beginning of 2022, the website moved to a more modest server. The expense on the previous one wasn't justified by the traffic of the web. Everything went well for a while until a sudden increase of visits at the end of the year rendered the web almost unusable. Some quick fixes were tried with no luck, so it made sense to close the doors, properly analyse the issues and start working on the solutions.

One of the main focus areas have been improving the generation and cache mechanisms of large contents like the indices of versions (which can contain up to nine thousand elements), and complex ones such as the index of sagas. Original generation times of around 20 seconds have been reduced to just 1-2 by tweaking the views and adding better cache techniques. The website seems to be working fine now but we will continue monitoring the performance now that we're open again.

Next priority items have been the simplification of certain aspects, and functionalities of the website. There is a long list of little tweaks here and there. For the user, the most obvious change is that the forums are gone, and any discussion about the versions/games/sagas can happen just below the contents as regular comments.

Finally, in spite of being a little change, the addition of an icon to the versions indices showing which ones have a parent game will drastically improve the identification of orphan versions, and ultimatelly increase the pace at which the game->version relationships are created.

Lets keep fingers crossed, and hope that the web can remain open for a long time...