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.

I can not delete my profile!!!