Server Performance...
 

Hi all. We moved the forums over to our new server farm last night. I'm not sure, but I think some of you may be having problems viewing the forums site? The new location will be faster than the old one when we get the configuration completed. On the old machine, the web server, the database, and the site search engine were all running on one machine. In the new config, they will be all separate so they can be optimized and can run faster. However, getting there sometimes involves a few blips in the process.

So, are the forums working okay for everyone here? Please let me know, so that I can double / triple check our new configuration.

Many thanks,

Wayne

Hangs up every now and then when I hit New posts. Last time was an hour ago. Seems Ok now.

For the most part, things are working well. The speed on the forums and the wiki is fine.

I am seeing what appears to be the MySQL server dropping out intermittently. This behavior is usually memory related. vBulletin is a memory hog and needs good PHP caching to perform well.

Things to look at:
vBulletin config.php
php.ini
my.ini

Lets hear the specs on this "farm" :D


And, why are you hosting from IIS?

Sigh.

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...w4mH7ROLCD8f2n

Since the change, Firefox hangs nearly 50% of the time.

Chrome is a bit better but certainly not what it was before the change.

Don't be deluded into believing that it is working anywhere near correctly.

good ol PHP and mySQL, Both dedicated Pains in the ass.... Drove me mad to work with them.... Still miss them though.

I have tested it on multiple computers with multiple browsers, and I can't seem to replicate any hanging issues? Firefox, iphone, Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari, etc. Perhaps if you can give me some specifics on your particular system that would help?

This also might be related to the DNS records populating across the Internet as well.

-Wayne

At this time of the day (see post time stamp) things are usually really quiet. I rarely get any "trouble" until the back up kicks in at about 10:30 Dutch time! If I experience any problems during these quieter times I'll let you know - I'm guessing information from these times will help weed out problems related to being just too busy...

I've identified a problem that may be causing issues - it has to do with a limit on the number of connections to the database. For some reason, they are getting maxed out when they are queued. I don't seem to have this problem with the other server, I'll have to check on this setting.

I also just moved the search functionality to our dedicated server. This should significantly speed up daily operation *and* searching too.

-Wayne

I've tried it on two different machines, at two different locations, both running Windows XP. Both have sufficient RAM (2GB).

When it hangs trying to load M-Shop, the other tabs for other sites will function just fine.

The issue is intermittent. This morning both Firefox and Chrome were both fine.

10:35 EDT:

It just took five minutes to get this page to load in Chrome.

Firefox is still trying................

You've got some serious issues..............

10:44 EDT:

Problem disappears.

Very odd. I have two machines here running the database as a master / slave. I have logging performed on the machines every one second (takes a snapshot of what they are working on)

Here's machine one at 10:42:58AM that says there's no pending requests on the database:

Here's the 2nd machine (the search processor) that shows no queries pending for Peach either?

So, it would appear to not be a database issue at this point. If it were a database slowness / pending issue, then it would show up as pending requests (seen this hundreds of times in the past when I've been tweaking the Pelican forums).

The only major change I have made (other than switching servers), was that I turned on gzip compression for the webpages. The previous server had this turned off, which causes the full download of all of the page code. Compressing it reduces the transfer time significantly.

I'll keep looking at the configuration to see what I can come up with.

-Wayne

Thanks for the info.

If it were not for the fact that two different machines from two different ISP's exhibited the same issue on two separate days, I'd also conclude that it was a PC problem.


But, on each of the events, the PC would load other sites just fine.


I will continue to post when the issue rears its ugly head..............

Thanks, please let me know. It took me many years to get the Pelican sites up and running well. They get about 3X as much traffic as Peach, so we should be able to make this work. The #1 solution for Pelican was just adding more hardware (it runs on 3 servers). That, and a little bit of tweaking to the vBulletin code (which I haven't done on Peach yet), seemed to work.

I have a strange feeling the problem lies somewhere with the main server, not the database. I will take a closer look...

-Wayne