Hi folks,

After Rick did a superb job getting our Classic 2+ million board transferred, there are a few things we need advice on. Here's the board: http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php

I've tried to look-up the items here, but having no luck finding the same problems being discussed.

Questions:

1) We're seeing periodic pauses or freezing when clicking a post, a thread, a submit button. We've tried to do some tuning in MySQL and PHP, but it's still occurring. It's being reported by admins, mods and members on IE and FireFox. It typically last from 30 seconds to a couple minutes. We're getting too many double-posts because of it.

2) I understand that the first time a reader goes to a thread, they get the first post. Then subsequently jump to the first new unread post when they return. That's what's supposed to happen, right? We're getting first time visits to threads where it jumps to the 4th or 5th post, then the reader has to scroll back up the page. Sometimes it starts on the 2nd post. Sometimes it works as intended. Our complaint thread on it is here: http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2123596&page=1#Post2123596

Those two issues are by far our biggest headaches. Here are a few other items we'd like to change if possible.

3) Is there a way to blank the "1" + "week(s)" in the default advanced search range?

4) Is there a way to allow longer subject titles than 50 characters?

5) Is there a way to move the sticky and hot topic graphics to the left side of the thread?

Something you may find interesting. Here's the article we produced to introduce some of the major features to the members: http://www.simhq.com/_commentary/all_031a.html

TIA.

I'm about to run off to bed soon so can't answer all your questions right now, but #3 is easy enough:

Open up /templates/default/search.tpl

You'll find this HTML similar to this in there. I say similar, because I changed the default to "Newer than 4 Years":


To remove the Day/Week/Month, just remove the portion that says selected="selected", and to remove the numeral, just remove the 4 in portion that says value="4" (in my example)

So what you want is this:


Incidentally, if you just don't like the default, you can change the number to whatever you like, and place the selected="selected" under either DAY, WEEK, MONTH, or YEAR to your liking. I would actually recommend a reasonable default to save users' time. That's why I set mine to the past 4 years to encompass most of the time frame.

--

As for #5, if I understand you correctly, that probably wouldn't look too good -- if you mean that those icons would be placed to the left of the thread title. Because then the titles wouldn't line up and look all haphazard. There can be zero, one, two, three or even more icons there. But if I misunderstood, please let me know. And if you still want that, let us know, too...

#1) Tuning MySQL has a lot of variables. It's not something I have much experience in, but there are a large number of variables that can make a big difference. Over on UBBDev.com there are a couple of posts dedicated to this discussion, they are a bit old but the basics should still apply and you might take a look at these:

http://www.ubbdev.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/postlist/Board/51

#2) What happens is it basically tracks off of their last visit to the individual forum. So, say there is a new topic in forum A. User visits that forum and reads the other topics in the forum, but not this new one. They later come back to visit, and it will consider everything since that last visit to be new. So even though they didn't read that particular thread earlier, it will still assume they did and scroll to what's been made since they were in that forum earlier. It's a bit hard to explain, but we can't track on a per topic basis, so we can only go off of the last visit to the forum.

What we'll probably do is add in an additional option on the postlist display to either go to the first post or go to the first "new" post. We had this in earlier versions, with a little arrow next to each topic that had new posts. Clicking on the arrow would take you to the new posts, while clicking on the topic would take you to the first post. We may go back to this.

#4) Under Display Options -> General -> Post/Reply Options you'll find the bit where you can specify the maximum subject length.

Love the article you made, very nice

Thanks "jgeoff" and "Rick".

We changed the settings to all blanks for the search. I think for our readers blank is better than default because of the long history people search on. There really isn't a "norm" for our searches.

We did some fiddling around with MySQL like incresing cache and some other things. It's definately better, but we're still encountering some small freezes.

Any other tips for a Windows-based server running MySQL?

I know... MySQL is more optimized for Linux and Apache, but we couldn't go that route.

One thing you might try is checking to see if there are any specific queries that are the culprit or if it's just the overall workload. You can turn on slow query logging and check that file from time to time. You'd need to edit the mysql config file and restart mysql. You'd add something like:

log-slow-queries=filename
long_query_time = 6

filename would be the path to where you want it to log. 6 can be changed to another number, this will make it log anything that takes longer than the specified number.

I'd also recommend making sure you have your search history set to a specific period; you don't want everyone searching for things that are 4+ years old on a large forum as it will use resources to do the full text search while the forum is busy doing its thing.

Thanks folks, appreciate the help.

We're still working on the freezing, but one thing is clear. In spite of our best efforts to educate the readers, we have several who are looking for something with a search setting of all 104 forums through the entire date range. Even setting a minmum seems not to help. They're setting the search at less than a month, but more than a year, or some such nonsense. I'm working with our tech to see if we can outsmart them. That seems to be the cause of the freezes, at least according to the logging.

Rick, I hope you can provide an alternative to the post jumping. Starting at the beginning of the thread would be a big help. Check the pummeling we're getting. Wow. http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2123596&page=1&fpart=1

Sorry you are having these jumping issues - we also run a fairly large board, and have not had any complaints about similar issues.

The post jumping works fine - and it would be nice if it were improved to have a link to the last unread post at the top of each thread (in addition to the current method)

The only way that my users would jump to the most recent post, if if they were to click on the newest posts table in the sidebar -a part from this it works as intended.

Have you got your users to clear their cookies if they are having serious issues - might help

I do see your searches are taking a very long time to execute. What I did was altered your dosearch script so it uses the 7.1 search routine. You should notice that it's much faster now. I did a search for 'test' within the past 2 years prior to the change and it took about 40 seconds. I did it after the change and it took about 2 seconds. So, this should help with the slowdowns and freezes.

Sorry about the complaints on the jumping. Since 7.1 is just about out, we won't be able to do anything for it in that version, however I do have this on my list of things to do for 7.2. One of your users has found a workaround for those that don't like it or understand it, where they just click on the 1st page of the post when there are multiple pages.