FORUM Extremely SLOW

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mikosiko
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FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by mikosiko »

Any one else have noticed that the forum is extremely slow?... for me every single click take more than 1 minute in some cases to get access to the selected page/topic/category etc.

Always the status bar shows "Waiting for google-analytics.com" or similar... and is not my internet connection.. other sites work without problems at all.

Somebody has an idea for what reasons it is so slow?

an a perfect example: After write this post an click "Submit" it took almost exactly one minute before it was posted... "waiting for forums.devnetwork.net" was the message this time
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

Sometimes the forum slows down when certain operations are performed by users. It would be good if we could update the hardware, but we would need more donations.
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Jonah Bron
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Jonah Bron »

Benjamin wrote:[...] the forum slows down when certain operations are performed by users [...]
I've noticed that it always takes a long time to delete a post. Is that one of those "certain operations"?
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

Yes. Sometimes updates take a while too, depending on how old the post is it seems.
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califdon
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by califdon »

Yes, this has been a problem forever. I know that the administrators have worked very hard trying to find anything that could be tweaked to help, but it remains an annoying problem. I hadn't ever noticed the google-analytics message before. Is that something that really provides benefits to us? If it's not, perhaps we could disable that?? And yes, the deletes and certain other operations have always been problematic.
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s.dot
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by s.dot »

Do other large PHPBB boards experience this problem?
Wonder if this is a PHPBB issue or a custom PHPDN mod issue.
Anyone re-checked db indexes lately?


I know I have ran a far larger forum with far more members and I never had a speed problem. Of course, mine was custom software streamlined to do exactly what I wanted with minimum configuration values.

It's just a bit odd. Even on minimal hardware PHP is fast, SQL is fast. Perhaps it's all the search engine requests and page scrapings going on?
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

What were the server specs on it?
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Eran
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Eran »

What are the specs of the machine running this forum?
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

VPS 256M 10GB if I recall correctly.
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Eran
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Eran »

Yikes :) that's pretty harsh. What is the size of the db?
mikosiko
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by mikosiko »

Wow!!!... very harsh!! :).... around 608,000 post... is that too big?.... any chance to reduce the DB?... maybe moving old post to a historic DB or implement partitions (if not done yet)?... to tell the true the slowness is almost in every single action according to my perception... very annoying ... which are the alternatives to grow/improve the server? .... ($$$$)?
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

The database is currently 1.2gb.
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Eran
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Eran »

I guess that says it all
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Benjamin
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by Benjamin »

Yes, yes it does.
josh
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Re: FORUM Extremely SLOW

Post by josh »

The server sounds pathetic. http://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting/ host gator's lowest plan is $20 a month and would be at least a step up. Also the physical hardware these VPSs run on are likely more modern (16 Hyperthreaded cores, RAID-10 mirroring & striping , DDR3, 20mbps uplink, etc..). I'm not a Dell fan but I've had some PowerEdge's in my possession and they are *fast*

$20 a month:

Code: Select all

CPU
0.56 GHZ

RAM
384 MB
And for $30 a month:

Code: Select all

CPU
0.84 GHZ

RAM
576 MB
Besides hardware, here are some other steps to try:

Are we using my-small.cnf instead of my.cnf ?
Have we set maxRequestsPerChild to '1' in httpd.conf?
Have you set MinSpareServers to 5 and MaxSpareServers to 10 and give that a try?

MaxRequestsPerChild > 1 = memory leaks
not using my-small.cnf = holding huge amounts of data in memory that just waste precious free memory

Running with your distro's default httpd.conf on a VPS is a BAD idea. You'll end up with a bunch of httpd processes sitting around eating up all the memory, and the one process that is actually doing work can't get any memory. The typical VPS will have no swap drive either, so if memory gets exhausted it will cause time outs exactly like we experience.

Next time its slow, log in and run `top` and post the output here. Also press shift+m to sort by order of highest memory usage and post that as well.

We could also use tmpfs for SESSION storage and for /tmp, and nginx webserver plus php "fast cgi". There is absolutely no way 15 users should bring down a properly configured phpbb webserver

Instead of donating, I'd be willing to host it on my server (in return for a portion of donations received)
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