I’ve been forced to come to the conclusion lately that the bulletin-board software we’re using doesn’t match that well with the size of the message board.
This shouldn’t cause any problems for those of you who login to read and reply to the last day or week’s post, but it does mean that searching the archives of the board (not the archives of Coolboard, but the old posts here) has been causing excessive load on the server that’s hosting the board. Some of you may have noticed this when your searches timed out.
Until I can get some more RAM in, I’ve put some limits in place on how much CPU time and memory individual requests can take. The idea is to minimize inconvenience, so I want to tune them to allow as much normal usage as possible. (The other day, someone searched the entire archive for “whistle”. Not normal!).
If, in the next little while, you’re presented by an error telling you that whatever you had just done took up too much memory or execution time, please drop me mail at webmaster@mati.ca letting me know what you were doing when you saw the message.
Actually, twice in the last week I’ve been unable to sign onto C&F at all (I know that makes lots of you very happy, especially you, Walden!) I click on the bookmark and it times out without me ever getting on to read the latest posts.
Have you looked at vBulletin? I don’t know if it’s any better than UBB but a lot of forums I go to that were using UBB have switched to vBulletin. It works basically the same way but has a few added extra junk.
I dunno, it might be worth a look.
shrugs
[ This Message was edited by: TelegramSam on 2002-10-07 10:23 ]
One thing I really like about here, and this is as good a place as any to say this, is that it’s fast. Compared to other boards I use, it’s lightning. I think maybe the lack of heavy graphics and fancy extras helps. Thanks Rich and Dale.
I’ll second the vBulletin vote, I run a board for the company I work for, we used to have UBB and switched to vBulletin. They have automated conversion tools to bring over old posts and users to the new format. It was a painless migration. I can’t really say, though, how much different archive searches will be. At the time, we only had 9-10,000 posts, not as many as you have here.
BTW:
Last week one of the major internet backbone service providers had some problems, available bandwidth shrank to a trickle on some segments. As a result access routes to some common sights were signifcantly degraded. So if you were have access problems last week. It may not have been the server or your ISP, it could have been the Internet Wide problem.
On 2002-10-07 17:00, LeeMarsh wrote:
BTW:
Last week one of the major internet backbone service providers had some problems, available bandwidth shrank to a trickle on some segments. As a result access routes to some common sights were signifcantly degraded. So if you were have access problems last week. It may not have been the server or your ISP, it could have been the Internet Wide problem.
Yes, UUNet loaded a bunch of bad routing tables to their servers, and each time it failed, it passed more and more requests along to other servers. As those got the bad routing tables, service slowed more and more.
Rich, have you looked at upgrading the phBB software you are currently running? Right now they are at version 2.0.x, they may have some better threading in the new iterations.
Rich, have you looked at upgrading the phBB software you are currently running? Right now they are at version 2.0.x, they may have some better threading in the new iterations.
Yep, but that’s not going to fix design flaws, and it took more than a little effort to go from 1.4.2 to something that I’d actually run and still sleep well at night – there’s real business stuff on this machine too – and I’d like to avoid doing that from scratch.
But the problem here isn’t that I don’t know what’s wrong. That’s the easy part; I need to put more RAM in. That’s not news, but there are more pressing things for me to spend money on right now, so I figure I’ll try to get the program running quicker instead.
But I can’t duplicate any of the problems that I see happening in the logs, so I need you guys to tell me what the heck you’re doing.
(The correct way to solve the problem would be to do full-text searching with something designed for full-text searching!)
Cheers,
-Rich
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[ This Message was edited by: rich on 2002-10-08 00:29 ]
How about No. of posts divided by 100 in $$ as a donation from each board member? Anyone with fewer than 100 posts need not bother, and the high posters (like me :roll: ) would pitch in a bit more. So, you have 500 posts, you pitch in $5 (All voluntary of course). Aventuria must be pulling down big bucks as an intern right now and Loren can always sell another whistle. I made $9 busking the other day (someone gave me $10 to stop, and I blew $1 on a cup of coffee), so I think I am in a position to commit to pitching in $11 or $12 or whatever my postcount is right now.
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/bloomfield
[ This Message was edited by: bloomfield on 2002-10-08 10:29 ]
But the problem here isn’t that I don’t know what’s wrong. That’s the easy part; I need to put more RAM in. That’s not news, but there are more pressing things for me to spend money on right now, so I figure I’ll try to get the program running quicker instead.
But I can’t duplicate any of the problems that I see happening in the logs, so I need you guys to tell me what the heck you’re doing. >
Rich-
Have you checked the timeouts, and settings like that? Are you carrying persisten connections? And, are you using session variables as opposed to a database schema? (I’m just stabbing in the dark, these can all be system resources).
Also, what is the disk size/access speed of your hard drive? These are all things to consider…
Have you checked the timeouts, and settings like that? Are you carrying persisten connections? And, are you using session variables as opposed to a database schema? (I’m just stabbing in the dark, these can all be system resources).
Look, folks, I appreciate the help, but this is what I do for a living, and I know exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, except for one pathological case which appears to be occurring occasionally that I can’t duplicate. The only thing I need is for people encountering the pathological case to tell me what they did to trigger it.
Unless someone wanted to give me RAM, in which case there are two things.
Cheers,
-Rich
[I’m kidding about the RAM. It’s just a logistics problem here, because I (in Ottawa) own the box but someone else (in rural Quebec) owns the rackspace (in Montreal).]
[ This Message was edited by: rich on 2002-10-08 20:57 ]
I click on the bookmark and it times out without me ever getting on to read the latest posts.
and Loren can always sell another whistle. I made $9 busking the other day (someone gave me $10 to stop, and I blew $1 on a cup of coffee), so I think I am in a position to commit to pitching in $11 or $12 or whatever my postcount is right now.