UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Speed difference between 6.1.1. and newer versions?

Hi,

We are still experiencing a very slow board and cannot figure out what is causing it. My partner has optimized the database already, but it takes around 10 seconds (40 queries) to build the main index page. Way too long obviously.

Now I just checked another board and it is much faster, and used only 14 queries to display the main index page. It is version 6.2.3, while ours is 6.1.1.

So, where changes made to improve the speed after 6.1.1?

Sanuk!

Sounds like you have post tracking turned on

Hi,

No, unfortunately we had to switch that off already.

Sanuk!

I think there were speed improvements between those versions. As 6.1.1 still had a lot of the old perl code. With 6.3, I believe they have removed all of the perl code. I think you can expect an increase in speed anytime that second digit roles over. Like from 6.1 to 6.2 to 6.3.

Hi,

Thanks. So, perhaps we should make the move to 6.3.

Sanuk!

You will gain some speed from 6.3... but more importantly, how large of a forum do you run, and on what kind of server (dedicated or shared?) More often than not, slow forums are due to being hosted on a overloaded shared server, or a slow dedicated server with outdated versions of software like PHP and MySQL

You have your forums set to show from all dates. Change that to just show last two weeks by default. That will amke a big difference.

Hi,

"Change that to just show last two weeks by default."
Where / how can I change this?

Sanuk!

Hi,

We are running on a dedicated server, and I believe the database even runs on its own dedicated server.

I really do not think that our hardware is the problem.

Sanuk!

Hi,

"Where / how can I change this?"
Never mind, found it.
Changing now.

.....

Changed all of them to 1 week, but while it seems that the forum indexes are a bit faster the main index page is still *very* slow (10+ seconds, just now even got a 25sec one ).

Sanuk!

Well, there are people here running on dedicated servers... dedicated PII servers with only 128MB of ram, which still is not powerful enough for a large site. You still didn't say how big of a forum it is.

How many members? How many usually online? How many posts in the database?

Hi,

Okay, some numbers.

We have 6000+ members, but only 1800 unique a month (~500 a day). On average there are 25-40 people online, we have pretty much only registered users (guests cannot read any of the posts, only index pages).

We have 26 forums in 6 categories, with a total of ~190,000 posts.

The board runs on a Netra 333MHz with 1Gb of memory and another machine (my partner just made the split so don't know the specs of the other machine).

So, while we have a fair amount of posts / posters I would not call this a big site, and I think that the hardware should be able to cope with it, right?

Sanuk!

Netra 333MHz? I would assume this is a Sun machine running a UltraSPARC processor. 333 is not a powerhouse to say the least... Most sun systems are coming standard with 500+ MHz

(obviously, these MHz ratings are not the same as an Intel/AMD MHz rating) But 333 is still fairly slow by SPARC standards.

And you're right, that forum is not very lage, and should have NO problems on most servers. Just as a comparison, my site has 300,000 posts, has about 1200 new posts per day, plus photopost and some other scripts on the site...

and I'm running with 1GB of ram and on a P4 2.6GHz single CPU. This is far from top of the line in the server world, yet it runs the forum very fast, and has a lot of room for growth.

So, I'm still willing to bet either your hardware is underpowered, or not optimized nearly enough. A forum of your size shouldn't be having the type of page generation times you are describing, as many people here are running sites of the same size or larger on similar hardware without these issues.

So, I would just look and see if you can possibly upgrade or optimize your server at all first, and if not, it may be a good time to find a new server.

Hi,

"So, I would just look and see if you can possibly upgrade or optimize your server at all first, and if not, it may be a good time to find a new server."

Thanks. Have forwarded this to my partner and I hope it will be useful to help improve our speed.

Sanuk!

I can almost guarantee you improved results by clearing some junk from your laston table:
Spring Cleaning.

I now wipe the last on table daily, removing anyone not on in >60 days. No complaints and tremendous speed improvement. I've set up a Cron task to look after the chore for me daily - and to optimize the table after it's run. Works like a champ. Perhaps someone here could write a nifty PHP script to be tucked in to the admin section for those unable to easily get "behind the scenes"?


Gord

Hi,

Ran your query from that thread, but only ended up with 10 records.

However, we do have a huge amount of members (~3000) who have not been online in over 6 months, many of these accounts even have 0 posts and I would have no problem deleting them (anybody know the SQL query for this?)

If I were to do that and then delete the orphans, would that help?

Sanuk!