Hello Folks,

Got a quick question about the scalability of UBB. One of the things that I've noticed in recent weeks is that one forum in particular of mine has slowed down drastically. This is both with loading and especially with posting to it. There's about 6000 threads in that forum, and the default topic view is 45 days, 40 threads per page or so. The board itself is doing about 10-12k hits per day.

I've been investigating doing improvments an basically a duplicate of the machine I have in production.

I've turned on mod_gzip and this has improved the load speed of the board while lowering my bandwidth overhead.

I've gone in on the test machine and increased the file buffer cache, increased the network sockets and etc. This has had little if any effect.

I've been using the system tools and I'm not seing high disk utilization, very little in fact. The amount of memory I'm using is approximately 100M out of 1G.

The CPU doesn't appear to be too overworked but I fear it may be getting a bit long in the tooth.

I've done tests locally with PHP acceleration and it does in fact make the board more responsive in so far as pulling up threads and reads. However posting still takes 5-15 seconds on a good day.

There's two more things I know for sure that I'm going to try on the test machine, and I'm looking for more suggestions.

1. Increase the CPU speed, simply put I have another machine which I'm going to test to see if this has any effect.

2. Too many topics in one forum. I'm trying to narrow down whether or not this is due to too many files in the directory even though the OS is said to not have any complications until you get to 65535^16 files per directory. The aspect I'm looking into is a that the CPU just has too much junk to crunch in one directory.

I try not to otherwise alter the board / break bookmarks / adjust the layout. I'm trying to keep this the same as much as possible. The users will be understanding however there's no need to swat a fly with a cannonball.

I'm running a *BSD OS uniproccessor, would I benefit from stuffing a second one in?

Moving topics from one forum to another and letting that one be 'slow' or on another machine even would be more acceptible than upgrading to UBB threads unless it was absolutely neccessary.

I also have some hesitations in installing PHP acceleration in case there are some migration issues with moving to UBB threads. I'm trying to cover as many bases on a test machine before I go making an investment in hardware or software that I don't need.

I appreciate any input that people have, I'm using http_load in the lab to simulate vast amounts of traffic.

Thanks!