I have been very busy over here with a ton of unrelated issues. But here are a bunch of items to check off. These were collected from random chats between Gizmo and myself from earlier today. They are based on your original messages to him (where he has shared the questionable technical bits with me), and based on the instructions he has already given to you. My chat comments are the random 2 to 5 minutes I could muster up during my busy day
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• are your scripts stock?
• have you compared them to stock scripts?
• have you replaced the stock /admin /scripts and /libs folders with the ones from the stock archive -- after you've made a backup of your site?
• what about your forum titles/descriptions. are they all using regular UTF chars? do they have quotes or apostrophes or slashes in them? these shouldnt really matter, but i figured I'd ask anyways.
Mostly Bluehost and shared hosting related stuff beyond this point --
• if the server you are on times out after 30 (or 60) seconds (test by doing a search, to see how long it takes to return results) then your forum probably has outgrown the shared hosting plan you're on. THAT was the reason I upgraded on Bluehost from starter (skipping mid) to Pro Business in 2007.
I'm rambling some basic testing ideas here.• Test if your pages only fail during the main forum listing. but the post list works fine.
• If pruning times-out on Bluehost, check from your Bluehost cPanel, if your CPU is being throttled. If it is, then thats why you are getting a timeout, WITH error. You have outgrown your current hosting tier.
• If you have 187 forums (thats a lot for for an entry level hosting package), your site has probably been around for a while. and that may be the case. I reached my max hosting capacity on Bluehost starter package when I hit about a 600MB database size in 2007. You can view the total uncompressed size through phpMySQL table list.
I'm still just rambling issues that I came across and what I found was the errors from my experience with Bluehost shared starter pkg.When I then upgraded my hosting package to a Bluehost Business Pro account, I regretted trimming/purging my forums, since the problem was that I outgrew my hosting, and not the software. For the following three years, I regretted doing that prune. Then I looked back and saw that it was a good idea because of how my pruning was done. As a site owner, providing quality content is more desirable to me, than just providing the daily chit-chat of general discussions from five years ago. Especially when the intentions for my sites are to provide a useful resource for my niche topics. I want a visitor to come to my sites and find the information that they are looking for through quality content. My advice for "pruning best practices," is that it needs to be done by actually paying attention to the "poor quality" posts and removing those. Keep the good ones. In fact, when you find a good one, move it to a section out of general discussion areas and keep it for an Advice/HowTo/FAQ/Technical... useful information section.
Are you having shared hosting server issues that are preventing you from pruning?• close the forum.
• then wait 5 minutes before pruning.
• use the default 5 seconds before page refreshes. and the default post settings from within the scripts. if your admin scripts are stock, then this step is already good.
• use a smaller prune range and stack your prune executions/submissions in batches. Closing the board will lower the chances of you triggering the CPU throttling on your Bluehost shared hosting account.
Hint: run this procedure at outside of peak times. A Sunday/Monday. Past midnight. But before 3am... (again, I'm purely guessing) to avoid fighting others on your server, for CPU cycles and CPU throttle triggering.
And as always, closing your forums should be done when any sort of pruning or other site maintenance is performed.
EDIT -- I have a text file at my home office with a few slight php.ini updates to be done for larger UBBT forums. its really basic. one was the "128MB" mem limit set to scrips. and the other was an script execution time, and i think there was one more minor thing. im not home atm, so im just going from memory of nearly 5 years ago.
----php.ini for medium to larger ubbt forums----; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume
memory_limit = 128M ; [PHP5.4 DEFAULT = 128M]
; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
;
http://php.net/max-execution-time; Note: This directive is hardcoded to 0 for the CLI SAPI
max_execution_time = 30 ; [PHP5.4 DEFAULT = 30]
----php.ini for medium to larger ubbt forums----If you're on Bluehost, chances are you are on one of their servers where the minimum version of PHP is set to PHP5.4. They sent an email to all their current customers in late 2014 (IIRC) stating they would no longer be supporting older PHP versions such as 5.3, 5.2... 4.x, etc.
I believe the php.ini lines posted above, were settings that I increased when my forums were running on PHP 5.2 (2012 IIRC) -- before the 128MB memory_limit was the default in PHP 5.4. So you should already have them in your PHP54 php.ini as their default settings. It would not hurt to double-check them on your box though. For PHP 5.2, its default was memory_limit=32MB, and max_execution_time=30 was the same.
My CURRENT php.ini on Bluehost is basically stock, with one minor change for an unrelated script I'm using on an unrelated-to-ubbt addon domain.
In your cpanel, chose the "phpconfig" option to use "PHP 5.4 (Single php.ini) Same as PHP 5.4, but all sub-directories will use ~/public_html/php.ini"
This will eliminate the chances of a misplaced php.ini floating around in one of your directories, causing havoc. And UBBT7.5.8 should work just fine on PHP5.6, but since that version of PHP is still in on Bluehost's cPanel, I cannot confirm that it does or does not work -- there is no sense in my testing production software on a beta platform.
Again, everything above is just a dump of the information I tossed around in a Google Hangouts session with Gizmo earlier today. I've only edited it mostly to add bullet points and replace "has he" with "you might try" verbiage.---extra bits---
•Bluehost has their own custom cpu throttling settings. BlueHost's founder, Matt Heaton calls this "Hosting Nirvana."
http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=185http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/bluehost/http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?19623-CPU-throttlinghttps://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/564• Shared hosting should be avoided for high-traffic sites with high demands on a databases. But if you must to use it, opt for the highest level of service provided. Currently "Bluehost Business Pro."
• Are you using a current php.ini file? (MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR .htaccess and php.ini) In the Bluehost cPanel, switch your php version from "PHP 5.4 (Single php.ini)" to "PHP 5.6 (Single php.ini)" and then back again. Your old php.ini files will be backed up with a unix time-stamp added to the file name in ~/public_html/php.ini. This will give you a fresh new php.ini file to work on. again, mine is basically stock. over 900MB for my larger forum db install since 2001. I've done a lot of cleaning over the years.
