The story with the slowdown and its fix.

Sparky

Just so you know, one of the admins is the Tech manager at H365, where boards is hosted, so I doubt they over looked tweaking etc.

अधिनायक

Sparky-s wrote:

Just so you know, one of the admins is the Tech manager at H365, where boards is hosted, so I doubt they over looked tweaking etc.

I didn't mean to suggest that the site technicians were unskilled just that a participatory approach might help, particularly when the OP states that the people involved in the optimisation effort now have other commitments. My reading of the first post is that the optimisation efforts have failed and that the next step is the reluctant purchase of another server (a web server I guess). This may or may not improve performance.

Posting server logs and discussing optimisation approach is free.

WizZard

One of the admins has previously asked for help in the Programming forum regarding optimisation of MySQL statements.
I'm sure they know that they can avail of the forum if they want.

WhiteWashMan

i bet scaramanga never had this problem when he was building his empire....

jimmycrackcorm

WhiteWashMan wrote:

i bet scaramanga never had this problem when he was building his empire....

But Scaramanga stuck to Ansi SQL 92.

Chong

Is the removal of the new posts function part of the update?

Esel

Willstev wrote:

Is the removal of the new posts function part of the update?

Yeah, noticed 'New Posts and 'Search' have just been disabled - presumably due to the speed problems?

Dave!

Giblet wrote:

Have you thought about cutting back on some of the features. Like mouse over thread previews, stuff that doesn't really need to be there. Also large threads do cause problems. Maybe they can be locked after a certain point and a new thread started with the same subject.

Some of the little helpers might be causing problems too, like when you type a user name into search, it will bring up a list dynamically of all the user names. Maybe have stuff like sigs off as default and they have to be turned on by the user on each post (haha). Crap like birthday notifications can surely be dropped aswell ...


All the little things might add up :S:S

I agree!

Danke for the update anywho, it was getting terribly frustrating recently :mad:

Victor

Things seem significantly faster, with no hung pages.

mike65

Yep its about 100% quicker.

Mike.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Zaph

Good news - new server. WooHoo!!!
Bad news - no search.
Better news - Cloud junior. Congratulations!
Crappy news - Regi has exams. Best of luck with them.

Sometimes it's not always about us - even the Admins have lives that they have to fit the rest of us into somehow. Who'd have guessed that?

Esel

I think if a choice had to be made between losing 'New Posts' and 'Search', then 'New Posts' should be the one to go. The main users are bored geeks and nerds who have nothing better to do than click on a link - apart from me of course. They should use wikipedia.org's 'Random Page' instead - they might learn something!

DublinWriter

esel wrote:

I think if a choice had to be made between losing 'New Posts' and 'Search', then 'New Posts' should be the one to go.

No way! It's my main excuse not to do any work, plus gives you a great cross section of what people are talking about in general.

I can't see why it had to go to improve performance. I don't know what DBMS boards uses, but how hard can it be to implement a reverse datetime index?

GoneShootin

Tell you what though since Search was disabled the site is a hell of alot faster

zAbbo

Disable all the crap, sigs, images, most of what giblet said. Maybe limit the max posts per page.

Cloud

Okay, I'm currently working with BoardTracker.com to replace our search with their engine. Things have improved as you can see already...

CrowdedHouse

It's flying now - even on dial-up

Cloud

Okay, to figure out this problem, I've disabled search for now.

Tonight at 9PM, we're gonna turn search back on for the night...

I expect to see a big jump in server loads.

So what I want you guys to do is, between 9 PM and 9 AM tomorrow morning, search, search, search - we'll see what the effect is and figure out what is slowing us down.

Many thanks to Board Tracker for all their help today.

tbh

done and done.

and I mean done!

kippy

I noticed a definite improvement up until about 15:00 today and it appeared to deteriorate again....
Not sure why or if there is any reason.
Anyway-keep up the good work-disabling the search initially made a big difference. Will try to assist in testing this evening.

EDIT:
The site you linked to Cloud, is either down or I cant reach it from here....could be a problem on my side but just in case its relevant.

Kippy

Cloud

Yeah they have some ISP troubles today, will work later on.

Blowfish

Cloud wrote:

So what I want you guys to do is, between 9 PM and 9 AM tomorrow morning, search, search, search - we'll see what the effect is and figure out what is slowing us down.

Oooh that sounds like a challenge. Expect lots of threads dragged up from 3 years ago;)

DublinWriter

What DBMS and associated search engine does boards sit on?

zAbbo

I think everyone uses the 'My Posts' feature which is a hacked search string(or something)

Everyone time i log on, a jump into 'my posts' its the only way I can remember what i was posting.

Spose if *everyone* done that, there'd be trouble.

po0k

Can we get some graphs of performance metrics between now and tomorrow?

Steveire

Does this mean that boardtracker indexes private forums now too? And what about public profiles and other things forbidden by robots.txt?

Also, how did this come about as a (catch-all slowdown) solution? (Outsourcing to boardtracker, that is). Is this a standard service provided by them?

zAbbo

SyxPak wrote:

Can we get some graphs of performance metrics between now and tomorrow?

Always with the graphs

Sparky

Where's the search Watson?
I have a job to do.

Cloud

Steveire wrote:

Does this mean that boardtracker indexes private forums now too? And what about public profiles and other things forbidden by robots.txt?

Also, how did this come about as a (catch-all slowdown) solution? (Outsourcing to boardtracker, that is). Is this a standard service provided by them?

No only private forums. This isn't the solution, just part of it (we will be investigating MySQL optimisation, web server swap memory etc.