> We now have avatars and more 'advanced' forum but wouldn't that put more
> stress on the servers?
> If so and the server wont crash ect. They must have fixed the problem we had
> before and they should now put pending credit and results back up!

Very valid question. I'll try to answer it:

Several points:
1) The new advanced forum actually takes away stress from the database-server by removing some of the stuff that shouldn't really be in the user table after all (post count, signature, forum prefs). This stuff isn't needed by the scheduler and transitioners and caused a minor slowdown when scanning trough the user table. Creating a new table solved this - which leads to:
2) The prefs etc. for the new forum is kept seperately in a new table (ie. a different file), which means that load is no longer concentrated on just a single file (which is bad) but spread more nicely on several files (boosts performance in the forum and other places - as well as it utilizes raid better).
3) There is yet another table that keeps track of read thread timestamps. This is also in a seperate file - ie. no additional load on the major tables like user/results etc.


4) The search indices for the mentioned tables (forum_preferences and forum_logging) are heavily optimized - this makes lookups for forum displays far quicker than before (even with the read/unread feature).

The only place where more load is being placed is on the webserver (it has to parse the threads for images, links etc to remove these if you have this as your prefs), but the webserver isn't even anywhere near maximum load, so this is not a problem at all - and the extra parsing isn't even that bad afterall. And remember: the webserver and the database server are 2 different machines.

Regarding pending credit lookups:
1) If you lookup any kind of credit related thing that has to do with workunits or results you access the most busy and large table (and set of files) on the database server. These files are used by almost everything - the scheduler, the transitioners, the validator etc. It's very important to keep this to the bare minimum at the moment.
2) At the moment there is no straightforward way of enumerating the pending credits without actually doing some really expensive (timewise) scanning trough the table (even with index search). Too many people scanning trough the table will lower the overall performance of the beforementioned services - ie. BAD.

So I'm sorry that there's a few database-efficiency related issues that need to be worked out before the pending credit link will get back.

I hope this answered you question. If not, feel free to ask again =)