1 Topic by TFD (edited by TFD 2008-01-16 01:27)

  • TFD
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Topic: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

ok so I had a shared host, once we got to were we had 70 people on constantly the server was bogged down.

I switched to another host and had to upgrade almost immediately to a VPS due to memory usage, even a VPS with 256 MB dedicated wasnt enough, I got errors and corrupted files constantly. So I upgraded again to 512MB ram and that fixed the errors. So during college football season (our busiest month) we had max 115 people online at a time and it worked just fine. Now that the season is over and usage is down I expected to see an increase in server response time. Instead last week the board slowed dramatically, I told the host and they cant figure it out.

I should state that my posters use the board almost like a chat, constantly reading, refreshing, and posting. This isnt the type of place wher you post and wait a day for a response. Its very busy but its just text with small 50x50 avatars, no picture or video uploads or downloads.

So the host is telling me the bandwidth is fine, I have plenty of memory but my CPU is maxing out and its caused by a heavy mysql load.

So here some questions:
I was asked if the board has a caching modual, I know there is a cache but Im not sure if its the same, the cache on punbb is for the search right?

Anyone have a punbb that has a lot of use? Does anyone have mysql problems?


The system admin said some of the more popular boards dont use near this much CPU and for the posters it should be fine and that I should consider using one of the more popular boards.

Im at my wits end dealing with this!

My boards info
its laid out like standard punbb pretty much, only a few mods like profiles. Nothing that should effect performance. No ads, no graphics except the banner.

I do have about 150 styles/themes for the users to choose from, thats the only thing I can think of, they are all laid out the same just different colors for different sports teams and each has a different banner.

database is around 300MBs, gzip is on, I have pruned and optimized the database as far as using the mysql tools in cpanel

I set a robots.txt to stop spiders (at the hosts request)

Bandwidth used
oct 28gbs
nov 25gbs
dec 22gbs
so far this month 10gbs (total 20gbs by months end)



does anyone have any ideas? Im desperate, they are saying the cpu use is going to make me upgrade again to a dedicated server and thats a lot more money. Why cant a simple text board handle 70 posters? is it mysql? Id be willing to let someone from punbb log in to my control panel or FTP to check whatever you need. Im out of ideas.



Thanks to anyone who can help me out.

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Drop me an email. I'll investigate.

MySQL should not be a bottleneck, although I can think of some instances (and some modifications) which cause issues. I'll be able to tell more by looking at your site.

3 Reply by TFD

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Smartys wrote:

Drop me an email. I'll investigate.

MySQL should not be a bottleneck, although I can think of some instances (and some modifications) which cause issues. I'll be able to tell more by looking at your site.

Sent, did you get it?

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

TFD wrote:
Smartys wrote:

Drop me an email. I'll investigate.

MySQL should not be a bottleneck, although I can think of some instances (and some modifications) which cause issues. I'll be able to tell more by looking at your site.

Sent, did you get it?

No, just send it directly to my email (smartys at this domain).

5 Reply by TFD

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Smartys wrote:
TFD wrote:
Smartys wrote:

Drop me an email. I'll investigate.

MySQL should not be a bottleneck, although I can think of some instances (and some modifications) which cause issues. I'll be able to tell more by looking at your site.

Sent, did you get it?

No, just send it directly to my email (smartys at this domain).

at punbb.org? Sent smile

6 Reply by TFD (edited by TFD 2008-01-16 02:15)

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

hmm I subscribed to this thread but got no email. Thats weird. Ive noticed my board email as admin doesnt reach my posters at hotmail at all.

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

mmm, yeah, I'll check it out

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

I'm still waiting for your response btw

9 Reply by TFD

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

sorry dealing with a poster, sending now

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

No problem smile

11 Reply by TFD

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

ok replied to both

  • Registered: 2004-03-02
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Smartys, What sort of thing did you look for? Did it resolve anything?

I'm hitting a similar problem now on a VPS. Memory and disk io are fine, it's the MySql CPU usage which I'm hitting problems with.

We had 260ish online at once yesterday, most just reading, the only real problem was when there was a flurry of posts at the same time and it started to lag pretty badly.

Database is just under 200meg.

TIA,
Rich

13 Reply by TFD (edited by TFD 2008-04-23 19:58)

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

barrowfc wrote:

Smartys, What sort of thing did you look for? Did it resolve anything?

I'm hitting a similar problem now on a VPS. Memory and disk io are fine, it's the MySql CPU usage which I'm hitting problems with.

We had 260ish online at once yesterday, most just reading, the only real problem was when there was a flurry of posts at the same time and it started to lag pretty badly.

Database is just under 200meg.

TIA,
Rich

The fix for me was to clear the main forum. once it got up to around 15K topics/160K posts it was taking forever, you can prune that back or I just hide the forum and swap in a new empty forum with the same name, that way the old posts can be recalled if needed by me. I was told that the database has to sort all those posts each request by a user (post/refresh) and my people use my board like a chat, lots of posts and quick moving topics. Anyway as soon as I hit 15k topics I have to hide or prune. if you close but leave it viewable you get the same problem.


I get to 30k topics in a month during a normal month. so that twice a month I have to clean house. Hope that helps

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

The fix for me was to clear the main forum. once it got up to around 15K topics/160K posts it was taking forever, you can prune that back or I just hide the forum and swap in a new empty forum with the same name, that way the old posts can be recalled if needed by me. I was told that the database has to sort all those posts each request by a user (post/refresh) and my people use my board like a chat, lots of posts and quick moving topics. Anyway as soon as I hit 15k topics I have to hide or prune. if you close but leave it viewable you get the same problem.

The point being made there is that viewforum.php has to load all of the topics in a forum, sort them, and then output the specific subset that is asked for. When you have 15,000 entries, doing so can be slow.

barrowfc: If the issue happens again, I would suggesting seeing if you can pinpoint which queries are hanging. Since you're on  a VPS, you can just log in to MySQL as a user with SUPER privileges and type "SHOW PROCESSLIST", which should list the current connections (and any queries they're executing). If you post them here, I can analyze that a bit and suggest ways to deal with it.

  • Registered: 2004-03-02
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

TFD & Smartys,
Thanks for the info.

The main forum is close on 125k posts with 10,000 topics so I'll give it a prune sometime shortly.

Will try getting some more info as above, thanks for the pointers.

Thanks,
Rich

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Mmm, I wouldn't prune it, it's useful to have. It's just better to have some logical divisions.
This is why some larger forums by default only display topics posted in within the past x days. It means a smaller number of topics are searched through on each pageview.

  • Registered: 2004-03-02
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Ahh, I meant archive rather than prune. We've posts going back to 2002  (and some older ones never imported I think...somewhere!).

18 Reply by TFD

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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Smartys wrote:

Mmm, I wouldn't prune it, it's useful to have. It's just better to have some logical divisions.
This is why some larger forums by default only display topics posted in within the past x days. It means a smaller number of topics are searched through on each pageview.

There is a way to display only topics posted to in the last X days?

  • Smartys
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Yes, by editing viewforum.php to have the query only return topics with last post times in the last x days. You would also want to add an index to the topics table on that column.

  • Registered: 2007-03-25
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

wow this was very intresting topic ...

by the way ...

is there any modification for 1.2 that makes an archive forum and makes an option for the user to show the post of x numbers of days or pages ...

MyFootballCafe.com  is Now Online!

21 Reply by TFD

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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

SuperMAG wrote:

wow this was very intresting topic ...

by the way ...

is there any modification for 1.2 that makes an archive forum and makes an option for the user to show the post of x numbers of days or pages ...

Not that Ive seen.

22 Reply by TFD

  • TFD
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Re: Hosting problems, I need help bad. PunnBB problem?

Smartys wrote:

Yes, by editing viewforum.php to have the query only return topics with last post times in the last x days. You would also want to add an index to the topics table on that column.

I dont know how to do this sad