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

Hey All,

My forum is growing and I'm pushing the limits on my server with my forum.  I'm not sure if something is wrong with my forum, the mods I've got installed, the DB, or anything else.

I need an expert in PHP, MySQL, PunBB and overall Server Administration (LAMP environment running WHM / cPanel on a Virtuosso environment) to come in and do a deep analysis, make recommendations, and do optimizations.

Anybody interested in an hourly job and / or have recommendations on companies that are experts at optimizations?

Please email me with info and rates.

Thanks!

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

On the PunBB part, you could hire any available Pun's developer.  On the global admin part, there's plenty of people... the trick is to hire one good.

Re: 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?

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

The mods. It's always the mods.

And Apache probably, you should try Lighttpd.

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

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

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

Bluddy mods!   (You mean modifications, not moderators, right?  wink )

The mods that I've got loaded and are touching the DB are:

? Mark Topics Read
? Private Messages

Other than that I've got a bunch of minor changes to the code for things like "recent posts" etc.

On average I'm pushing 60,000 pageviews a day and about 1,000 new posts a day with about 80 members and 100 guests logged on throughout the day.  My DB is about 200 mb

I've got debug mode on and the query counts look pretty average (6 - 14 queries per page).   I'm thinking I should have some kind of slow query log running to catch any queries that end up being slow.

Smartys, do you do contract work?  If so, please email me.

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

Smartys wrote:

Apache works absolutely fine with PunBB, there is no need to replace it wink

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. big_smile

8 (edited by MattF 2008-01-19 18:18)

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

proweb wrote:

I've got debug mode on and the query counts look pretty average (6 - 14 queries per page).

Just out of curiosity, how long is it taking to complete the queries, on average? Less than a second, several seconds or above?

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

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.

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

proweb: I don't, but I'd be willing to take a look at your forum for you. If you're interested, just send me an email (smartys at this domain)

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

MattF wrote:

Just out of curiosity, how long is it taking to complete the queries, on average? Less than a second, several seconds or above?

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.

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

What page was that from?

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

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.

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

The 11 query page was a regular thread / topic page I think.  The 13 query was the index page.   The problem is there is no consistency between which pages are slow and when.

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

My guess is if I look at the queries themselves, I will see some connection in terms of the tables in use smile
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).

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

Great idea.  I've followed the excellent instructions for logging slow queries here: http://www.cpanelconfig.com/optimize-a- … l-queries/

Hopefully a culpret or two will rear their ugly heads!

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

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!

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

proweb, It may be you can increase this 4k limit by increasing mysql cachesizes , or pop in some ram,
phpmyadmin offers good debugging for this in recent versions.

look for red numbers under "Show MySQL runtime information"

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

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. tongue
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.

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

doh, yes but 4k was a tipping point.

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

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

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

fwiw, i had problems with the private messaging mod and a few indexes helped immensely. i don't remember offhand what indexes were needed, but it brought my ~100k pv/day (mostly punbb) site to a screeching halt, and the fixes were obvious from logged slow queries.

i also recently had to deal with rapid growth, and setting up nginx as a static proxy to apache (i may move to using it fulltime w/ fcgi) helped a lot.

another mod that needed help was the Reputation mod. sure would be nice if these were coded with a bit more smarts.

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

what is ur site?

i want to sign up lol