Server and Performance (now with NimbusHosting from post #129 onwards)

[charlesr]

I think I figured out what was happening with the reaaaally slow page loads. It was probably the server doing self-updates. It happened again just now for a couple of mins. I don't think it happens very often and is important for security purposes.

[Fader209]

Are the avatar pics smaller for every one too or is it a Fader-only problem?

[charlesr]

vbulletin confirmed that I might need to keep threads shorter e.g. 200 pages max, so I've locked a lot of threads. The database tuner suggests it is now running a lot quicker and page loads generally seem quicker to me. Has anyone elses noticed any difference?

[BaronSqwelch]

Loads faster for me...well Off Topic does and thats where my problems were. It had actually stopped working at all on my phone but now its back to normal!

[ETC]

Absolute mess for me, hangs, crashes and when I edit text or message it postsNothing or throws up a character error

[charlesr]

anyone else seeing this?

[capcom_suicide]

Is it normal for a forum that we have to lock threads at 200 pages, and start a new thread? I don't see this other places?

[charlesr]

It's a known issue with vbulletin. It's only a problem in popular long threads if many people all jump in at the same time - the slight delay in processing can then reach critical mass and pile up causing servers with low memory to spiral into oblivion due to I/O bottlenecking on the harddrive. Since I called it out, several other forums have started doing closing threads too. Since implementing, we haven't had a single forum outage due to bottlenecking. (We've had a few due to database corruption which I'm still trying to figure out, but that's completely different).

We have 1GB of ram, which would normally be plenty. For example, average server response time is 0.6s and average download time is 0.15s, so it's plenty fast enough in normal situations. For info, average page load (includes client browser page build time) is 2.4s. However, I'll be upgrading to 2GB soon.

[capcom_suicide]

It's a known issue with vbulletin. It's only a problem in popular long threads if many people all jump in at the same time - the slight delay in processing can then reach critical mass and pile up causing servers with low memory to spiral into oblivion due to I/O bottlenecking on the harddrive. Since I called it out, several other forums have started doing closing threads too. Since implementing, we haven't had a single forum outage due to bottlenecking. (We've had a few due to database corruption which I'm still trying to figure out, but that's completely different).

We have 1GB of ram, which would normally be plenty. For example, average server response time is 0.6s and average download time is 0.15s, so it's plenty fast enough in normal situations. For info, average page load (includes client browser page build time) is 2.4s. However, I'll be upgrading to 2GB soon.

Thanks for info!

[charlesr]

We now have an upgraded server. Please post if you see any unusual issues.
Thanks to Nimbus hosting for doing this.

The following will be happening shortly:
vbulletin upgrade - possibly with a new classified area if it checks out in testing.
vbulletin style mods - new desktop theme in testing and if it's any good, will also check out the mobile style.

[Brad]

Great stuff Charles.

[capcom_suicide]

Seems fast and lovely from Norway!

[teddymeow]

Was having issues with connecting recently so I hope this upgrade fixes these.

Nice work.

[charlesr]

All still going smoothly for everyone? Seems pretty nippy to me.

I'm going to hammer the sphinx server now to see what happens.

[capcom_suicide]

Really good performance still for me.