Hi all,

Since the installation of V7.02, the server load increased from 30% to 90%. My ISP is not happy with that, neither users who' are experience slow performance. My provider figured out that this is caused by the Shout Box. People like to use it (fun&easy), so I would like to keep it.
Any suggestions? Can I change anything in the configuration?
http://www.femistyle.be/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php

I have heard of people mentioning it as a load issue but havn't actually seen any proof of that, nor have i seen anything to fix issues short of disabling it.

If you like the chat, you could try using something like my IRC Chat addon and using an IRC server for your users "fun and easy" chatting, it's free and shouldn't cause any load issues...

You have a URL where I can find that one?

Yessum, Clicky Clicky

It's fairly easy to configure; and by default uses the IRC server I operate; if you need any help in setting up a channel somewhere, let me know.

Neither should the Shout Box - I think Rick needs to see if he can track it down on some one's system that is reporting it.

As UBBT gets bigger and more add-ons it might start to surface as an issue for others that currently don't have this issue.

I wonder if there is some common application running on the Host that is the culprit as to why some see it and some don't see it.

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nt, i've heard of the same issues from several users; when they turn off the shoutbox all returns to normal...

I'm not disagreeing with that I'm only saying that it would be nice if Rick or someone else with the knowledge could actually track down the REAL cause so that perhaps it could be fixed for everyone.

I don't see this issue on my site but I run on a Windows Host not Linux. My other account hopefully I'll have running within a couple weeks and it will be on Linux but hopefully I won't have the issue on my Linux one either.

There have to be many UBBT 7.x sites out there and so far I've only seen a few post that they have this issue so it's not like some bugs that affect ALL users. This one is odd in the sense that only a few see the issue for some reason which leads me to believe that there is some configuration or software running on their system that is at least contributory to the issue.

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Mainly this would probably depend on how many people are online and just sit on a certain page or post to the shoutbox. The shoutbox does a check for new content every 30 seconds, and it's a very small check in that it just checks to see if there is anything new in the SHOUT_BOX table.

Where this could get out of hand would be if you have a very large number of people using it at once. But even then it's not a very large resource hog as the queries are much smaller than if those users were actually browsing/making posts.

I hear you Rick, but something is causing extreme resource usage for some and not for others. When your host provider tells you to knock it off or he will shut down your board then that's a problem that needs fixing. Luckily shutting off the Shout Box appears to be a quick fix for them but then it also prevents them from using a nice add-on.

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Hey everyone,
I'm the tech-guy of the hosting-company which reported it to our customer, which put it on this forum.
Take a look at: http://statserver.ris.be/web3.php
There you see that there was a much bigger load from tuesday until friday-morning.
This is exact the time where the shoutbox was on, so I did some research.
It is a very busy site, and is responsible for about 25% off the traffic for that server. If it uses 25% of the servers traffic, it will use 25% of its load.
Normal operation: 30% overal-load during daytime, so 7.5% of the load is for this website, 22.5% of the other sites.
If shoutbox is on, the load-average is about 90%.
The other websites use still the same (7.5%), so with the shoutbox on this websites uses 82.5% of the servers load!

I like all the features, but fairly said: this isn't normal anymore.

So I digged a little bit deeper.
with the previous version, /ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php has 3500 hits per day.
With the new version /ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php has 150.000 hits per day!
This all with the same number of visitors and traffic.

Now if I look at the Apache Server Status, I see many childs with the POST-command to /ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php.
Each proces took apache between 1-2 MB of memory, and about 0.5-2% of CPU.
Mysql uses more: about 28 MB per child, with only 8 MB shared.
I saw in the logs that the file which was sent back wasn't big (between 99 and 2000 bytes).
But for every page you must:
- Fork a httpd-child
- open a database-connection
- read/write to the table
- close the database-connection


I don't know how the shoutbox is build, but I surely think using Apache/PHP/MySQL is _not_ a good idea for a chat!
It works great if you only have a few users, but yeah then nobody will chat.
If you got much users, the chat will be used, and the load will raise exponential.

That's why all the IRC are on special programs with a special build server/client.
Or for low usage you can use a Java-applications.

Oh yeah: I'm not the guy which blockes every new idea, but use the right ones please.
This is just like an example like I had 5 years back: A client sent a photo to me, but it was to large. So I told him: you can split the message in your outlook in separate messages of 1 MB.
The next day I received an tiff-image of more then 200 MB.
Email isn't build to transfer big files,
Webservers aren't build to chat.