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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57 |
Hi all, Since the installation of V7.02, the server load increased from 30% to 90%. My ISP is not happy with that, neither users who' are experience slow performance. My provider figured out that this is caused by the Shout Box. People like to use it (fun&easy), so I would like to keep it. Any suggestions? Can I change anything in the configuration? http://www.femistyle.be/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
I have heard of people mentioning it as a load issue but havn't actually seen any proof of that, nor have i seen anything to fix issues short of disabling it.
If you like the chat, you could try using something like my IRC Chat addon and using an IRC server for your users "fun and easy" chatting, it's free and shouldn't cause any load issues...
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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57 |
If you like the chat, you could try using something like my IRC Chat addon You have a URL where I can find that one?
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Yessum, Clicky ClickyIt's fairly easy to configure; and by default uses the IRC server I operate; if you need any help in setting up a channel somewhere, let me know.
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
"fun and easy" chatting, it's free and shouldn't cause any load issues... Neither should the Shout Box - I think Rick needs to see if he can track it down on some one's system that is reporting it. As UBBT gets bigger and more add-ons it might start to surface as an issue for others that currently don't have this issue. I wonder if there is some common application running on the Host that is the culprit as to why some see it and some don't see it. .
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
nt, i've heard of the same issues from several users; when they turn off the shoutbox all returns to normal...
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Joined: Nov 2006
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
I'm not disagreeing with that I'm only saying that it would be nice if Rick or someone else with the knowledge could actually track down the REAL cause so that perhaps it could be fixed for everyone.
I don't see this issue on my site but I run on a Windows Host not Linux. My other account hopefully I'll have running within a couple weeks and it will be on Linux but hopefully I won't have the issue on my Linux one either.
There have to be many UBBT 7.x sites out there and so far I've only seen a few post that they have this issue so it's not like some bugs that affect ALL users. This one is odd in the sense that only a few see the issue for some reason which leads me to believe that there is some configuration or software running on their system that is at least contributory to the issue.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 9,242 Likes: 1
Former Developer
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Former Developer
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 9,242 Likes: 1 |
Mainly this would probably depend on how many people are online and just sit on a certain page or post to the shoutbox. The shoutbox does a check for new content every 30 seconds, and it's a very small check in that it just checks to see if there is anything new in the SHOUT_BOX table.
Where this could get out of hand would be if you have a very large number of people using it at once. But even then it's not a very large resource hog as the queries are much smaller than if those users were actually browsing/making posts.
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
I hear you Rick, but something is causing extreme resource usage for some and not for others. When your host provider tells you to knock it off or he will shut down your board then that's a problem that needs fixing. Luckily shutting off the Shout Box appears to be a quick fix for them but then it also prevents them from using a nice add-on.
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Joined: Jan 2007
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 2 |
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.phpThere 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!!!
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 9,242 Likes: 1
Former Developer
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Former Developer
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 9,242 Likes: 1 |
The main reason you're seeing the increased hits for ubbthreads.php is this. In prior versions ubbthreads.php was just a script that was called to display the main forum list. In this version everything goes through ubbthreads.php. It's our core script that is used for everything. So, before when you're adding a post you'd see a call to addpost.php. Now, it still calls ubbthreads.php with a parameter of ubb=addpost. So, the increase in that area is normal.
It's true that if the shoutbox is used as a regular chatroom it can definitely eat up some CPU. It's not written to be a full fledged chat room, it only has a 30 second refresh, with no way to force it to refresh other than loading the page. But some people will try and use it that way. Perhaps we can put a word of advice when enabling it that it could cause higher loads if people are trying to use it as a normal chatroom.
For example, here. We have it enabled, but it's only used here and there, so it causes no issues.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1 |
I regularly have many posts to my shoutbox - yet have not seen any major issues as a direct result of its use. Bear in mind on traffic, some of it may be down to bots crawling the new pages. Perhaps the shoutbox could vanish for guests - this would prevent bots from crawling it.... (and would be a benefit for signing up) - in fact all boxes should be group based
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
in fact all boxes should be group based \:\) LOL - don't be stealing my Enhanced Security requests thread idea
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
Hmmm... possible bearing ? Use Persistent Connections? Only enable after speaking to your web hosting provider and ensuring that they allow PERSISTENT_DB_CONNECTION connections. Opening / Closing connection if Shout Box is doing that can add to overall slowness.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Perhaps we can put a word of advice when enabling it that it could cause higher loads if people are trying to use it as a normal chatroom. You could promote my UBBDev mod for the pJIRC for "full fledged chatrooms" for those who need a large active chat...
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Oh and NT, I woudln't ever recommend turning on pconnections, unelss you own the server anyway lol
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1 |
and even then I would be wary...
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
and even then I would be wary... exactly... You know, some script providers code in pconnections and don't allow non-persistant connections by default? I had to go into a client website once and recode some of their scripts so that they would drop the connection when users navigated away vs trying to hold them open :/
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,095 Likes: 1 |
Wonder if one of these people with Shout Box problems have enabled it.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Wonder if one of these people with Shout Box problems have enabled it. possibly.
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newbie
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newbie
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 25 |
I tried it with AND without, same result.
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 2 |
Thats only normal. A persistent mysql-connection is only persistent for the child which opened it. If you make another http-connection (like browsing to the next page), the chanches that you get the same connection are very slim. If this happens the origal child will have a sleeping mysql-connection for about 1 hr (default mysql) which uses memory, and will make perfomance in the long time worse!
I can not delete my profile!!!
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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57 |
I tried it with AND without, same result. How many users are using the Shout Box at the same time? I just enabled it again and UP, server load up to 90% again :-( Maybe it's just to popular at my site.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
How many users are using the Shout Box at the same time? I just enabled it again and UP, server load up to 90% again :-( Maybe it's just to popular at my site. If it's a proven cause of the spikes (which you've ultimately proven it is) and your users enjoy the option of having a chat for your forums, you could use one of the (soon to be 3) alternatives available. 1. My pJIRC addon at UBBDev, it's free all around, and uses an IRC Server as a backend. 2. The Raidersoft addon at UBBDev, the raidersoft system is not free, but the integration information is provided none the less. 3. FlashChat may be a viable option as well soon, I've talked with the author and as soon as he can get ahold of a *legal* copy of UBB.Threads he's stated he'll work on the integration (please note that providing your software to 3rd parties *is* a license violation)
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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 25
newbie
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newbie
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 25 |
How many users are using the Shout Box at the same time? I just enabled it again and UP, server load up to 90% again :-( Maybe it's just to popular at my site. http://forums.clubsi.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=onlineI have a decent amount of users online I suppose...and they do like to use that shoutbox when I put it up. I also have gizmo's IRC client installed; hwoever, my users tend to flock to the shoutbox still.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
hehe if one was to disable the shoutbox you'd give them no choice ...
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Posts: 25
newbie
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newbie
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 25 |
That's what I have done now.
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Joined: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,649 Likes: 1
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,649 Likes: 1 |
That stinks. My SB gets used quite a bit, but so far no complaints from my host - nor have I noticed much effect on the shared server I'm on. I can't help but agree that there's something else going on, truthfully.....
GangsterBB.NET (Ver. 7.6.1.1) PHP Version 5.6.40 / MySQL 5.7.23-23 (was 5.6.41-84.1) / Apache 2.4.54 2007 Content Rulez Contest - Hon Mention UBB.classic 6.7.2 - RIP
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 67
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 67 |
Femistyle, how did you change the "shout box" permission (view) to "logged in" users only. I could not find it in the Control Panel.
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Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1 |
This isn't possible at this stage - although it would be nice to have it group based.
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 67
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 67 |
I guess Femistyle used a "mod" on his/her site to accomplish this...I guess this is a feature request..
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Theres a thread somewhere ( here) that discusses making sidebars member only.
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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 57 |
Femistyle, how did you change the "shout box" permission (view) to "logged in" users only. I could not find it in the Control Panel. One had to login before he or she could join the conversations. Anyway, I disabled it and everything is working smoothly again. So no Shout Box at my forum.
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Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 1,796
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 1,796 |
Possibly making the database utf8 will fix this as well?
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 162
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 162 |
A solution to decrease server load would be to put the shoutbox on its own page. Remove it from the sidebar. I guess most of the time the users don't use it, as they browse the forums. When they like to chat they can go to the shoutbox page and chat with other members. Or make the shoutbox a popup window. The users who like to chat can leave it open.
In both cases performance is saved and the constant reloads are only produced by the users who really use the shoutbox.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1 |
a pop up/out box would be good
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
I do believe that the shoutbox definitely needs looked at in future revisions; a lot of people experience load, and a lot of people like it... BUT theres no way for individuals to disable it... so moving it to its own page would solve a lot of problems and be a good first step to making some adjustments on it .
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Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 2,143
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 2,143 |
doesn't that then turn your shoutbox into a chat, which it is neither designed to be nor capable of being?
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 16,369 Likes: 126 |
Actually, Rick has stated that in a future version he's wanted to make some sort of chat system, which would expand off of the shoutbox; so this'd be speeding that along
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Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,839 Likes: 1 |
doesn't that then turn your shoutbox into a chat, which it is neither designed to be nor capable of being? Problem is - that is exactly what it is on several sites - a chatroom...
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2 members (Ruben, Gizmo),
1,005
guests, and
103
robots. |
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
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