I have a dedicated server which only does two things - runs the UBB forum and runs MailEnable mail software. MailEnable is running very smoothly and in the MailEnable world we're a relatively small install for them, only 400 or so boxes. On the UBB side we have 25,000 members and 400 forums, which I believe makes us one of the largest Windows installs.

http://forum.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php

Our server kept crashing in 2006 until we had a total system failure in the fall. We rebuilt the server and hoped we could hobble through until this new version came out. It has been crashing every few days in the past few weeks. We did the upgrade last week even though I had concerns about the content island issues, in hopes of getting the crashing to stop. Unfortunately the server's still crashing, it was down for 3 hours yesterday morning.

We have a gig of RAM and oodles of disk space. The server is usually only 20% busy so it's not maxing out the processor.

Any thoughts on any tuning we can try, to help this to run more smoothly? I do need the forums to all have content islands, but I have them set to generate only every 30 minutes to try to keep things relatively stress free ...

The server event logs never show anything amiss before the crashes.

When you say crashes do you mean UBBT stops responding or hangs? Or do you mean Windows hangs or quits responding or is it blue screening?

What version of Windows are you running?
What version of PHP and MySQL are you running?

It could also be hardware issues if you're that popular things may not be able to be written to disk properly; are you using a standard 7200rpm ide disk?

I remote terminal into the server at its hosting facility, so what I see is that the machine no longer responds to pings, no longer displays any web pages and no longer answers remote terminal requests. The techs have to reboot it to get it responsive again.

The server's running Windows 2000, sp4, 5.00.2195

PHP is 5.1.1

MySQL is 4.1.16

When the server completely went down last fall (which happened when I was on a trip to Ukraine, I had to rebuild the server dialing in from a hotel in Lviv) they replaced the hard drive, in case that was the issue. The server has two hard drives - one for the OS, and one for the websites. I'm asking them to put in a third hard drive to handle the log files. I found on my other servers that providing a hard drive just for log file writing helped things go more smoothly.

Are they IDE or SATA or SCSI? If you can afford it I'd go with faster SATA or SCSI disks (7200rpm, 10k rpm, 15k rpm); if the disks are turning out to be the issues it would likely be a resources issue on the machine with writing to disk (it's also prudent to let you know that even writing to MySQL writes to your hard disk, as mysql files are stored as flat files in the end).

Well yes writing to any database causes disk access I know that. I will chat with my hosting company to get the details on the disk types.

Sorry, I've gotten in the habbit of providing way too much information in my inqueries; you never know when someone will stumble in with the same issues in the future ;)...

Well you probably get no choice but Server 2003 implements a completely different IO scheme and is much better at handling memory and disk IO. As for disk speed 15K SCSI drives on a GOOD RAID controller is going to beat out the SATA drives.

That does not explain though what is causing it to hang and not respond. Slow writes should show up in event viewer as an error.

Enable event logging and it may give you more details.

And this is a stand alone server, not a VPS correct ?

When I'm on your site and it's running fine it seems to be okay speed wise so that leads me to think something else is going on and hanging the system. Maybe it is a hardware issue that locks it up and nothing to do with software.

What type of access do you have to the system when it's running normally? Can you run all the normal Windows tools and get to all the diagnostic tools?
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I agree on a good raid controller and a 15k scsi beating the hell out of ide or sata, I'm just afraid that her host is running her on a standard ide/ata versus something more "modern" for the "ideal" setup...