UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Board suddenly running slow

In the past two or three days the pages my messageboard has been running very slowly. Members from several different countries are complaining. I assumed it was something to do with the server at our web host. But I asked them and they said that nothing has changed there, and that no-one else using that server has commented. I don't have anything else besides the board on this particular server, so I haven't been able compare speeds of anything else.

Any ideas of why the board is suddenly running so slowly, or what I can do to fix it?

This could be a number of things, including the connection between the server and the rest of the internet.

Could you explain more by what you mean by "slow"? Yeah, that sounds like a stupid question, but there's a good reason to ask it.

There are three different kinds of slowness.

The first is at the server. You'll know this is the case if, after clicking a link, it takes a long, long time for the page to start loading. But when the page does start loading, it finishes loading very quickly. The delay is all up front.

The second kind is at the network. You'll know this is the case if both waiting for the page to start loading is slow, and if it takes a long time for the entire page to download. For example, the page will load in chunks instead of almost all at once.

The third kind is at the user's browser. You'll know this is the case if the page always stops loading at a certain point before there's a delay. This is most often encountered with things like banner ads.

None of the three eliminate the other from also happening, which makes things very complicated.

I browsed your site for a few moments, and from what I can tell, it feels like a combination of server side slowness (slow to respond) and network slowness (pages loading in unusual chunks).

The slowness was only really apparent for pages intead of images, which makes me suspect that the server is currently under a high load. You should ask your host if the server's been loaded lately.

I doubt your board would be the actual source of the load.

Charles
Many thanks for your helpful response. Again, yes, I would not be surprised if the host server is the issue, however, tech support there have suggested we look into whether we are experiencing this problem on load from static html web pages, or pages loaded from a database (in case the database has become corrupted). As far as I know UBB classic is not run from a database (perhaps you could advise if this is correct?). Tech support there commented on whether we had an access database that could have been corrupted so they could try to run a repair - now again from what I know/can see, we don't..but I wonder if you could comment further.

Many thanks indeed for all your help thus far - any other suggestions you have on speeding up the board will be gratefully received. Otherwise, we'll return to our hosts and ask them to look into the server performance again.

Best wishes

Sashi

UBB.classic does not use an actual database. The data is stored in files, commonly known as flat-file format.

Thank you, Ron.

Since you guys gave such excellent responses then I knew that the problem must lie with our server. So I pestered our web hosting company some more. They had previously told me that everything was fine there. But they changed some setting (I have no idea what), and this morning I woke up to a fast board, and very happy message board members.

Thanks so much for your help! <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />