Forum Growing FAST - Need Contractors To Optimize My Server / PunBB

Thanks Jeremie!    I guess I should probably start with PunBB, the mods, and the DB to make sure all is well and then go from there?

Apache works absolutely fine with PunBB, there is no need to replace it
proweb: What mods do you have installed?

I believe Jeremie was referring to the point that Lighttpd is reportedly far less resource intensive than Apache. Never having run Apache myself, I honestly couldn't say, but that's the general opinion.

Apache is probably much better for balancing such great load. I bet it'd have Lighttpd in tears.

A slow query log could definitely find some bottlenecks.
Another good idea would be to implement FULLTEXT searching, to reduce search load.

Great question!   One of my big questions is the fact that I can be navigating the same pages and sometimes I'll see a bunch of fast queries and some slow ones.  For example, just now here's what I got:

[ Generated in 0.098 seconds, 11 queries executed ]

[ Generated in 34.366 seconds, 11 queries executed ]

[ Generated in 1.900 seconds, 13 queries executed ]

Right now things are pretty fast, but when things are going bad every page is generated in over 30 seconds.

Smartys, thanks for the offer, I shot you a quick email.

In general I was hoping that by using punBB I could keep resource usage and costs low... that's why I stayed away from vBulletin.

My guess is if I look at the queries themselves, I will see some connection in terms of the tables in use
And there are a couple optimizations that can be put in place for larger forums to make them more efficient (especially when they start having thousands of posts per topic).

Smartys pointed out one of the slow queries was from a viewtopic query from a thread with 4000 posts in it.  He suggested that I should really consider not allowing topics to grow to more than a few thousand posts.

Maybe I'll delete all the posts in the middle of that topic (I've got a few "games" that run long).  Is that a good idea, and if so, what's the best way to use PhpMyAdmin to execute a sql command to do so?

Ugh... growing pains!   If only revenue increase in proportion to pageviews!

There's no "limit" of 4k, the issue is/was MySQL joining all the data for 4000 posts, sorting it, and then choosing 10 rows from it.
The simplest solution is to split the query up into two pieces, one which fetches the appropriate post IDs and another which gets all the data based on those post IDs.

No it wasn't, it was simply the largest topic in his forum and it happened to show up in the slow query log