UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback Please tell me 6.5 will be faster than 6.4

<rant>
Well, down grading from 6.2 to 6.4 was a major performance nightmare, will 6.5 be better/faster? I hate to say it but if 6.5 is another poor performance bust I will most likly switch to VB 3.0 when it goes final.
I can't believe Infopop redid the search feature and didn't have any idea on how it would slow down forums, sounds like they didn't do any large scale testing at all.
Some of the search features in 6.5 should have been included in threads for the past two years or so but are just now in development, why are they so far behind?
Soo here I sit after reading posts about how dissatisfied all my viewers are with UBB because with only 100 concurrent users my UBB forum slows to a crawl because the 6.4.1 search feature was poorly designed.
I keep hearing that every new release will have better performance than the last one, yet they keep getting slower and worse off than the version that they replaced.</rant>
I will be the first in line to say how great 6.5 is if that miracle ever happens, the above is just my frustration, crap rolls down hill and since I have to read about it from my viewers which are paid customers I figure threads needs to read it as I am a customer of theirs, and no I can not seem to register at ubbcentral with their new "simple" registration setup, so don't even tell me to post it there, thanks.

Sorry, I don't mean to come off as a jerk or anything (I am a realist), but I do not have a hobby site, it is a business site so my forum has to actually work like advertised and if everyone here says how great threads is then Infopop will continue to think they have a great product that does not need improvement.
Soo, for myself and others that have a large site I sure do hope 6.5 is a step in the right direction, Infopop don't fail us now (shakes chicken bones).

I'll post some specifics about the different page generation times using 6.4 and 6.5. This is running on my test server. Same data for each one, both running on the same server and me being the only person on the forums during these tests.

Main Forum Listing
6.4 Generated in .275 seconds. 11 queries took .076 of that time
6.5 Generated in .026 seconds. 7 queries took .016 of that time.

Postlist page
6.4 Generated in .415 seconds. 11 queries took .047 of that time.
6.5 Generated in .02 seconds. 11 queries took .004 of that time

Flat Mode with 40 replies in topic
6.4 Generated in .688 seconds. 14 queries took .045 of that time
6.5 Generated in .031 seconds. 13 queries took .008 of that time.

Search - All forums all dates
6.4 Generated in .575 seconds. 8 queries took .203 of that time
6.5 Generated in .207 seconds. 8 queries took .089 seconds of that time

Now there is more behind the search data as well. That same time was taken if the user went to the next page of search results or they viewed a topic from the result list then went back to the results. In 6.5 when viewing another page of results or viewing a topic then going back to the results it dropped down to .026 seconds and 4 queries taking .001 seconds of that time. The reason being that the search results are cached.

So, you should see substantial improvements with 6.5 in place. We did test 6.4 quite extensively but it's always different went released to the masses. The main problem is that the user's perform very complex searches or searches for things that will show up in just about every post. Not bad if just 1 person does it, but if alot do it then it causes problems.

So, we've addressed as much as we can in 6.5 and then in 6.6 we will probably take one more stab at it and possibly end up doing a search index.

wow!

sounds great Scream!

Awesome Rick, thats the kind of info we need, now I can show that to my users and it will help keep them off my back a little longer.
Any chance of just doing a search index for 6.5 and geting it out of the way early?

<Vent mode on>

I am absolutely at wits end with 6.4.1. The performance is so erratic, it'll smoke for a few days then it just crawls and dies. I have to babysit our forums constantly and try and tweak things, optimize tables almost daily, stop and start MySQL, or just sit by helplessly. As a user of our forums, I cannot stand them any longer and am thankful our readers are mostly a patient bunch.

As admin, the forums are killing me and are effectively robbing me of my personal life.

I have worked with Infopop on formal support tickets and no changes. I work with our host and our sysadmin and everything they say is our server isn't being taxed at all - resource util is low.

As they keep saying, it's "just bad software".

I know this probably isn't popular here, but I just can't take it any longer. We've been an Infopop customer for over 4 yrs and with our Member Access expiring this spring, either if 6.5 isn't out or doesn't rectify the performance problems, we will be spending our money on new software.

</Vent mode off>

6.5 dev5 is running on my site, drop by and see. I can't give details that aren't on the changelog, but WHOA! I love this version! As for slow downs, it's probably the server. I care for a site running 6.4 and they can have as many as 300 visitors in a 10 minute period, and as many as 18,000,000 pageviews each month. Look at thedieselstop.com, Operationsports.com, hometheaterspot.com, Leoville.com (sp?) and others with millions of monthly pageviews. I didn't notice, are you on a dedicated server?

JC, we are on a dedicated box, RH7.3, 1GB RAM (my.cnf tweaked to maximize it), around 60% disk util of 60GB, cpu utilization is always very low. We have one other program bouncing against MySQL to serve ads. We average well over 100 users online, peaked at 260, have 52 forums and a half million posts. Default view is one week. Unregistered/not-logged-in users cannot even search, I took that out.

I keep doing that show processlist and just see table after table locked, which I believe is the root cause of the slowdowns.

If 6.5 comes out soon we will try it. If it doesn't resolve the issues, bye. BTW we ran 6.3.2 for 9 months and never had problems like this, the forums always smoked. The problem started when we went to 6.4.1.

Well some run dual servers, one for their site and one for their database. I don't know if this is relevant, but I created an index page for my clients, that is similar to the IIP. I used to show 47 queries when I looked at the debug statement in the footer, now it's 19 or so. My index page is based on the categories.php file with a few extras, so I had to upgrade it to be compatible with the new beta (I'm a tester) so I'm guessing a lot of things have changed to result in the big reduction in queries.

[]J.C. said:
As for slow downs, it's probably the server. [/]
Sorry, it's the software, it's the worst I have ever seen (6.4), I have the same problems as Little Joe, some of the other sites you mention have more than one server etc. to compensate.
I also am on a dedicated server with 2 gig of ram, had to go that much just so threads would get out of it's own way.
The search feature is the biggest problem, it will lock your tables and your forums to a crawl.
I am going to start a test site and purchase a copy of VB 3.0 gold to test it out for a while, if it is as good as people say it is I will make the switch, plus it is half the price of threads.
I was also told 6.4 would be great and it was worse than the previous version so I would imagine 6.5 is going to be worse than 6.4, I can only go on their track record which has been pretty bad so far.
I contacted LS1tech.com, they made the switch from UBB to VB a few months ago and they like it a lot better, I most likely will to.
Sorry to bag on threads so much but it has been hurting my business and with 6.4.2 coming out soon sounds like 6.5 will not be around anytime soon.

I have seen otherwise, sorry your site has problems. I know what I see and what I have seen. Every host is different, there are so many variables to hosting it's not funny. Sometimes it can be a brand of memory, or mfr of the hard disk, or just the backbone in your area.

And don't get me started on chipsets.. Whatever works for you is fine. This thread seems pointless now, since you seem to have made up your mind and we're simply wasting our time

[]little_joe said:

I keep doing that show processlist and just see table after table locked, which I believe is the root cause of the slowdowns.
[/]

You are probably correct there. Are you running ANY modifications at all on the site? And script tweaks, hacks, addons, etc? On some of our servers, occasionally users who apply certain hacks to their forums will cause this same behavior, where you get literally dozens of locked processes, eventually bringing MySQL to it's knees. But after reverting to a stock forum, these always go away and the system goes about it's business with no issues.

I don;t know with 6.4.1 I do SHOW PROCESLIST in phpMyAdmin and it only shows 1 Process...

DON'T YOU DARE SWITCH TO VBULLETIN! THIS THREAD SHOULD GO INTO THE DUMPS!

Woah - easy there trigger. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and he'll be converted once he sees 6.5.

"Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!"

[]http://instagiber.net/smiliesdotcom/contrib/ed/BlueFlagEnforcer.gif[/]

The problematic parts are the w3t_Users and w3t_Posts table which get updated very often. Every time something needs to be changed, the table gets locked and no other queries can be performed simultaneously.

That's a problem of the MyISAM storage engine that is used by default and not only a software problem.
If you're on dedicated server you can try to switch to InnoDB. With InnoDB no table locks are made while updating the table. Keep in mind that InnoDB has more overhead than MyISAM, so you'll need a bit more RAM to get the same performance as with MyISAM. Changing the two problematic tables should be succifient.

Another bottleneck are the search queries. I modified my installation to use the MySQL FULLTEXT search in combination with the UNION statement (you need MySQL 4.x). It increases the performance significantely, especially on large boards with many postings.

So there are some things that can be done right now to improve the bottlenecks of the current version.

I just don't trust having no table locks..I mean I know what they are there for

[]Jeremy said:
[]little_joe said:

I keep doing that show processlist and just see table after table locked, which I believe is the root cause of the slowdowns.
[/]

You are probably correct there. Are you running ANY modifications at all on the site? And script tweaks, hacks, addons, etc? On some of our servers, occasionally users who apply certain hacks to their forums will cause this same behavior, where you get literally dozens of locked processes, eventually bringing MySQL to it's knees. But after reverting to a stock forum, these always go away and the system goes about it's business with no issues. [/]

Hi Jeremy, we do not have any hacks installed. I have specifically foregone hacks for performance, troubleshooting, and support purposes.

The only changes I have made are insignificant - removed search from unregistered templates, put our standard footer in the ubbt_footer.tmpl.

I understand JC's point about variances in servers and components. However, as I said we never experienced any problems while running 6.3.2. The day we upgraded to 6.4.1 is the day all of the problems started.

As a stop-gap measure, you might try turning off zlib compression - it can make a significant server load difference on a busy site.

[]AllenAyres said:
As a stop-gap measure, you might try turning off zlib compression - it can make a significant server load difference on a busy site. [/]

Our problems are resolved, our forums have been flying. Part of it was self-inflicted, part was IMHO 6.4.1 sensitivity to a properly tuned my.cnf.

I will make a full new post on what we did. I have been waiting a few days just to make sure our problems are all resolved.

Glad you got it solved.