Good old Open Source

[RichardCranium]

Any plans to upgrade?

Feel free to copy 'n' paste the following in an email...

Dear vBulletin support,

I'm the sysadmin for the UK's foremost techie site for IT consultants, CUK. Your wobbly vbulletin v3 software is flaky and the geeks are getting restless. It's not looking good for you.

To save your reputation over here in Europe, I suggest you bung us a free upgrade to v4 sharpish before these nerds go ballistic and start chucking out your systems & bitching about you to their clients.

Yours in anticipation,

CUK admin

[RichardCranium]

Tips optimising servers for large forums (>1m posts)

Blimey, 8 million posts and that was nearly eight years ago.

[DiscoStu]

I have a highly technical solution to this issue that will take approximately 2 minutes and completely resolve the problem:

Lock the old TPD and have sasguru start a new one.

<<Stu in "Thinking outside the box" mode>>

[FiveTimes]

I have a highly technical solution to this issue that will take approximately 2 minutes and completely resolve the problem:

Lock the old TPD and have sasguru start a new one.

<<Stu in "Thinking outside the box" mode>>

Loving your work Stu

[realityhack]

Loving your work Stu

This is, indeed, a quality suggestion.

[scotspine]

it *does* sound like either a poor db, poor db configuration or bad code or a bit of some/all.

[NickFitz]

Yes but when the DB is taking a long time to sort the TPD thread to display the info the end user has requested it holds up other users' requests and these time out. This has been a minor problem for the last few weeks but is becoming a daily occurence now when the forum is busy.

Yes, the DB could be optimized but there is no way of guaranteeing that a non-standard DB will upgrade correctly for future versions of VB that we may want to implement. With resource specific problems like this I have often found that upgrading hardware is quicker and easier than trying to weed out small gains through code optimisation.

Dunno if this might be any help: How fast can you sort data with MySQL ?

I'm not suggesting changing the DB from its existing structure necessarily; there may well be optimisations that can be made in terms of the server configuration. That comment on the thread RH linked to about using myISAM rather than InnoDB was possibly relevant.

I'll start digging through that copy of High Performance mySQL that's been sitting on the shelf...

[administrator]

Sorry Nick, missed your other post about VB4. Definitely looking to upgrade at some point but would rather the VB community bug checked it for a few months before we try it

Just checking some other bits and pieces as well but this machine only having 2GB RAM means that a quick and simple solution could be more memory in the short-term. Happy to let Nick have a look at the site in more detail - if you are up for it Nick.

No great rush with all of this, we are not looking to delete it right here and now. And if we were to do anything with it would be more likely that we simply close that thread and you can start a part II - should not be the end of the world - and that would be only if we cannot do anything to keep it going.

Reports of use of INNODB over MyISAM - good to stop table locking, which may be the problem here, but users often end up going back to MyISAM due to performance issues from threads that I have read in the past.

[administrator]

I have a highly technical solution to this issue that will take approximately 2 minutes and completely resolve the problem:

Lock the old TPD and have sasguru start a new one.

<<Stu in "Thinking outside the box" mode>>

Was typing my reply when you wrote that - honest

[realityhack]

Would it not be possible to restrict what the BB calls from the DB when users request TPD?

For example, to avoid calling all 200k+ posts, and maybe just the last few pages?

I'm not a DB developer, and know nothing about vBulletin set-ups, but surely that's an option?