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

Hi
it's 09.00 GMT in the UK here, pages taking about three minutes to load, no problem at this end, other US sites opening normally

cheers

Yep at about the same time in Holland (counted here as an hour ahead) I'm getting delays and weird happenings when I post quick replies...

I click on "post quick reply" it takes ages to reload the page then it stalls / stops. My reply is not shown on the page.

If I press F5 it is there though it takes another 2 mins or so to see the page...

And now ten minutes later it all seems to be working perfectly again....:confused:

Yeah just like taking your kids to see the GP - they're better when you get there!

Pacific Time after 10pm : incredible delays, refresh browser, restart browser, no difference.

Firefox, Windows 7

Third time it has happened.

I'm going to upgrade some stuff tonight. A helpful tip would be whether you can see the Pelican Parts website at http://forums.pelicanparts.com when experiencing problems here?

thx

-Wayne

I was working on the server about this time last night, that may have contributed to this particular slowdown...

-Wayne

What's weird is that I've got big loads on the servers right now, and they are flying.

-Wayne

Just had to reboot the server for a minute...

The reboot fixed a problem!

-Wayne

Update:

- Updated the vBulletin software to 3.8.7 (the lastest version for 3.X, which is faster than version 4)
- Installed VBSEO (helps with search engine rankings)
- Installed Peach into our backup rotation
- Moved attachments out of the database and into the filesystem.

Also, this error happened tonight:

"mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: [2002] Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted."

More info here: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted - Durgaprasad Gorti's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

I checked on the Pelican Forums Server and this is already set on that server, so I think this may have been contributing to some of the issues that people have been experiencing. Please keep me up-to-date if problems continue after tonight's server reboot.

Thanks for all your help!

-Wayne

There are problems. All I'm seeing on the home page of each forum are the threads that existed prior to the forum being taken down for maintenance last night. No pasts after that event are showing up on the forum's home pages. I've tried accessing them a number of ways and refreshing the screen but it looks like new posts after last night are simply not showing up.

I should clarify: New posts are actually showing up in threads but not showing up on the homepage for the thread. A new thread I posted is not showing up on the homepage.
For instance, Wayne's post C#25 immediately above this one is the last post which shows up in this thread on the Tech Help homepage.

Same problem in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I agree with kerry.
Something is wrong with caching. The forum homepage only shows 1 member online. New posts do not appear on the forum homepage.
Post counts and member counts appear wrong, too.

I'm still experiencing Hangs and timeouts as well....

I've got a problem with PM's
 

I keep getting a notice of unread pm's but I have no unread pm's the ones I've read are staying marked unread, and there is a notice of a message that I do not see in my list...
whazzup?:confused:

Post do not post. Edits do not. etc.

I could not login for most of the morning.

The server would recognize the login and thank me for logging in and then request another login.

I have a suspicion that most members cannot login.

I see no new posts from 12Ish this AM, only shows me as the only active user......Still get hangs lockups outs, I too have fought with the login system for a little as well..

I'e been logged in since yesterday so I'm not having login problems.

Whoops, the slave server didn't like the vast amount of changes to the attachment database and stopped synchronizing. I have re-sync'ed them (this happens when you do a large table update or change, as I did last night). One-time hiccup. All is working now, and the posts that were posted in the past 8 hrs or so are now showing up.

thx,

Wayne

I've noticed this "Like|Share" thing in the bottom right hand corner of each post.

What happens with a like?

Do these sort of statistics go towards a rating?

That's a goofy feature from VBSEO, I just turned it off...

Thanks everyone for your patience. I know that things can be iffy when someone new comes in and starts messing things up. But we're making major improvements to the forums here, and sometimes that results in an occasional goof up once and a while.

-Wayne

Thanks. I'm glad you did.

For years this bookmark took me straight to the diesel forum:
http://www.peachparts.com//shopforum/forumdisplay.php?f=15
It will work if you click on it from this reply, but not if launched from my browser bookmarks.

This is the one I have to use now:
Diesel Discussion - PeachParts Mercedes ShopForum

Five years worth of bookmarked threads & how to's now useless.
THANKS A LOT!
If I copy & paste the bookmarked url to a thread reply, hit preview then click on it, it will work, but not from my Firefox 5.0 bookmarks.

These all worked up until I logged off around 6 PM eastern last night.

A lot of us enjoy these older cars because we've seen that newer isn't always better. This site has become a shining example of that platitude over nite.

screen shot
 

Here's a screenshot of a failed bookmark launch from Firefox 5.0

Both links seem to work fine for me in Google Chrome and IE9.
I do see a problem with the first link. It has two forward slashes "//" between peachparts.com and shopforum. I'm surprised it ever worked like that. Change the double slashes to a single slash in your bookmarks.

Yes, the double-slashes in the bookmarks are causing problems.

There might be a way to have the server ignore all double-slashes. Let me see what I can do.

-Wayne

I'm pretty sure I can set the server to eliminate any incorrect double-slashes, but I won't be able to test until later on tonight.

thx,

Wayne

As promised, I installed a piece of code into the server to look for the double slashes that you have in your bookmarks and turn them automatically into single slashes. All your bookmarks should work now.

Thank you for pointing this out to me, as I was able to fix it pretty easily with your input.

-Wayne

Thanks for taking care of that. Sorry I was a little undiplomatic yesterday, but I was not a happy camper when it appeared that 5 yrs of research had been rendered useless.

Would you be willing to post your research? It sounds like you've got a good collection of links there.

The issue I had at midnight is probably fixed now but this morning I had issues accessing the forum via the tapatalk app

Tapatalk is not installed. There are security issues / database issues associated with allowing the Tapatalk application direct access to the database. I installed it for a while on the Pelican site, and then I think I disabled it. I'll be installing a mobile theme instead in the near future.

I'll take another look at it in the next day or so. If enough people use it, then it may make it worthwhile. I didn't really think anyone used TapaTalk anymore.

-Wayne

This isn't actually a good way to do this, you need a proper mysql query logger to see what your databases are trying to process

That is unfortunate, I bought that app so I could view this forum on my iphone.

The problem is that they use the built-in upload feature of vBulletin, and because it's an app, there's no way to change that, other than I guess disabling image uploading from TapaTalk. The image uploading features in vBulletin are not that good, and we've been running a custom version on Pelican that is much, much easier to use. I see people on the forums here posting to PhotoBucket, etc, all the time instead of using the feature here because it's a pain. For the sake of keeping all the content here, you want the photos posted on PeachParts, not somewhere else. So, I would like to move to this other system in the future. If I install the Tapatalk plug-in, then we can't do that (as far as I know).

-Wayne