Avatar Update
We have removed the 64x64 from the site (including the news) and have replaced them with Headshots of your
Human Avatar.
If you've noticed, the site is moving considerably faster, because instead of having to save and load (And query the database for) both versions of the avatars, we only have to do this for one :)
Let me explain this, in a technical way. As best as I can - to answer the questions that have been posted up to this point.
The avatars were located in one folder, that was over 13GB in size when it was just removed. That means that each time an avatar was displayed on the site (the 64x64 one) it had to search that directory for the right image (which caused crashing in NFS) as well as query the user database, for information on which avatar was the users.
With the HA only version, it queries from the HA image folders (which are separated) and there are no MySQL queries, as the information is already cached for each user.
That means that we're saving 13GB worth of file searching, and a database query to the most important table in the database, for each avatar load.