Need A Push in The Right Direction

[Ammit]

First let me say I hope this is the appropriate location. I am not looking for direct coding help, more over all application design so :fingers crossed: I have this one right.

 

I am the owner of an admittedly girly pony simulation game.

http://www.hajinc.com

 

I am adept enough at PHP and MySQl to do just fine at creating and working on my site, but I fully admit I only know rather surface level stuff and often web hunt and read books to fill in gaps in my knowledge as I find them. My site is set up with a very basic system of calling the database when needed and printing the returned data right away. As a general rule I use smaller queries when possible as it seems to greatly increase site speed. I use indexes as well for heavily searched text fields in the database but I am sure I do not know the best and most effective ways to use them.

 

During our busy times of year I have been having 'max_user_connections' problems. I have a dedicated server, have max_connections set to 200 and persistent connections set to off. I believe the second two statements are true. I went in with telnet and used vi to edit php.ini. I believe I was able to override the read only status using ! and phpinfo() says persistent connections are off so I can only assume it has worked. Like I said I am a bit of a fish out of water when it comes to any thing just beyond rather basic stuff.

 

My question is this. My site is not so big that it should be needing more then 200 connections at a time. I know that this problem is do to my rather hack job of scripting the site. Where can I learn more about how to manage my requests better and create a more streamlined application. I am not sure where to even start looking, but I know I need to do something better on my end. Not sure what even to call this.

 

Thank so much for any suggestions you can give.

-A

[awpti]

If you are an adept PHP Developer, I'd point you in the direction of CodeIgniter PHP Framework.

 

I use it myself on awpti.org and will be using it with OnlyTechNews.com

 

It uses the Model-View-Control method and the documentation is fantastic (User Guide link on the main page).

 

You may have to refactor much of your code to work with it, but it'll make things cleaner in the end.

 

If you decide to try CI, let me know. I'll give you some ideas on how to refactor what you have into working with CI.

 

ExpressionEngine Developer Guidelines are good guidelines to practice with the development of any application. I adhere to many of their suggestions myself. Makes development easy.