UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Version 7 Support Upgraded to 7.2.2 - Forum is slow to unresponsive

I've just upgraded to 7.2.2. When I tested immediately, things ran fine and I went to sleep. I'm awake again and the entire forum is down. Either it just shows a blank screen or shows a timeout, for every page. The server itself reports w3wp.exe taking up most of the server time. Nothing else changed - I only ran the forum upgrade script.

I am on Windows 2003 server pack 2, which is what I find on the web about this issue.

An error it gets is - Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in E:\forums\libs\smarty\internals\core.write_file.php on line 28

Great, now my entire main website is down too, because of the content islands my pages all draw from the forum server. I was supposed to go into New York today, too, to spend the day with a relative visiting from Germany ...

Any thought on how to fix this?

I found a website which recommended I increase the worker processes under app pool. It defaults to 1. I increased it to 5 and rebooted. Now I have five instances of w3wp.exe, each taking up 1/5th of my server resources.

Line 28 of core.write_file.php is basically trying to create a a temporary file. Can you take a look at your templates/compile directory and see if there are any files being generated within that directory?

Yes there are 5822 of them - pretty much all from today - most 1k in size.

Here's the content of one of them -

<?php /* Smarty version 2.6.9, created on 2007-09-11 13:46:21
compiled from jumper.tpl */ ?>


<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>
<?php echo $this->_tpl_vars['lang']['HOP_TO']; ?>
<br />
<form method="post" action="<?php echo $this->_tpl_vars['config']['BASE_URL']; ?>
/ubbthreads.php">
<input type="hidden" name="ubb" value="jumper" />
<select name="board" class="form-select">
<?php echo $this->_tpl_vars['choices']; ?>

</select>
<input type="submit" name="Jump" value="<?php echo $this->_tpl_vars['lang']['GO']; ?>
" class="form-button" />
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

By the way after a while all the w3wps drop to 0% used and the web errors go to an immediate "Service Unavailable". I think the worker apps have a timeout on them where if things get jammed for too long they automatically disable. I remember seeing that setting in the app pools area when I was in increasing the # of worker processes from 1 to 5, and then from 5 to 10. I'll set that back down to 5 and reboot. I also deleted all those 5822 files.

5822? Wow, that could be a problem, as with that many files it's possibly overloading the directory. There really shouldn't be that many at all. Are full permissions supplied on the directory so modify and deletes can be done?

I may need to look at this directly as that's definitely not right.

The IP address of this new 2003 server is 208.69.231.122 and you should still have the logon information from the previous server. It's forums.bellaonline.com. I just rebooted it again. It looked like the security on the temp-compile was full open, I had read that in one of the other threads about this issue and double checked it. You're free to log in and check if you want. If we get this solved in the next 1/2 hr or so I have half a chance of racing into NYC to see my relative before she goes back to Germany

The compile directory is starting to fill up with files again, and trying to view the forums gives

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in E:\forums\libs\smarty\internals\core.write_file.php on line 28

the process list has a number of w3wp.exe files which together take up 100% of the CPU.

I'm debugging on the server now to see if I can figure out what's going on.

Hey, did you do something? The forums are working

I see 20 files in that compile directory, and the entries for w3wp but they aren't taking over the server now ...

Well, I did clear out your cache directory. There were a *ton* of files in there, and some that I haven't seen before like .js files. I'm assuming those are from a modification?

Everything is regenerated now in that directory, and I'm keeping an eye on it to see if the slowdowns start again.

If you go here -

lowcarb.bellaonline.com

you'll see in the lower center a list of the last 3 forum posts. That was functionality you used to have in UBB. You killed it in the new versions but our users really love that ability - so I added the code into the file to keep generating those.

Here's what I do:

------------------

ubbthreads.inc.php in /libs - commands to create the js file


line 2744:
add after line: $feed_xml_file = "rss$feed_forum.xml";


// LISA ADDITION - WANT TO SAVE OUT AS A TABLE
$lisa_ci_file = "ci$feed_forum.js";


line 2833:
add after line: $rss_data = $smarty->fetch("rss_xml.tpl");


//LISA ADDITION - GET MY CUSTOM TEMPLATE
$lisa_data = $smarty->fetch("lisa_contisl.tpl");

line 2838:
add after line: lock_and_write("{$config['FULL_PATH']}/cache/$feed_xml_file",$rss_data);

//LISA ADDITION - WRITE OUT CONTENT ISLAND FILE
lock_and_write("{$config['FULL_PATH']}/cache/$lisa_ci_file",$lisa_data);

Here's the template file that calls -

lisa_contisl.tpl in templates/default - handles layout for js file
Should not have to touch on upgrades since this file isn't overwritten.
(whole file is new - creates content islands for us)

{* Script Version 7.2 *}
document.write("<table bgcolor=#FFFFCC width=100%><TR><TD class=category>");
document.write("<B>{$feed_name} Forum Posts</B></TD></TR>");
{section name=item loop=$items}
document.write("<tr><td class=category><a href={$config.FULL_URL}/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number={$items[item].TOPIC_LAST_POST_ID}#Post{$items[item].TOPIC_LAST_POST_ID}>");
document.write("{$items[item].TOPIC_SUBJECT}</A></TD></TR>");
{/section}
document.write("</table>");

We have 400 sites on BellaOnline and each one has a forum - therefore each one is going to have a matching JS file with the latest posts.

My initial thought on this so far is that there were files in either the cache or templates/compile directory that couldn't be overwritten, deleted, whatever, some type of permission issue, where it was basically causing the process to hang. Since those 2 directories have been cleared out, it seems to be running fine now.

Still watching it, especially interested to see if the templates/compile directory ends up with thousands of files again, as that's definitely not right.

Right now the templates/compile has 73 files in it, all time stamped between 2:04 and 4:19.

cache has just over 800 files in it, which makes sense since it'll have about 400 XML files from your system generating them, then about 400 JS files, which I need to allow my main website to show the "last 3 posts" for each forum.

If you have a quick and easy way for me to use your default XML files with ASP, I'll gladly do that instead, but I seem to recall back when you made this switch that integrating XML files into the live site would be challenging.

Well, now we have another odd problem. That server runs two things - our UBB forums and our MailEnable mail package. Now the web interface for mail won't come up - it says Service Unavailable. I didn't touch the mail system at all ... that is here -

http://mail.bellaonline.com/mewebmail/enterprise/lang/EN/Forms/login.aspx

I tried rebooting the server, and when it first came up the web interface came up, then it went down again ... I tried stopping and starting the IIS entry and that didn't help ...

The mail side was fine until this UBB upgrade Although I suppose it could be the worker process change I made? I'm not sure why adding more would cause it to stop working. I can play with that.

I think that might have been the worker process change that screwed up MailEnable, I think it's only set to handle 1. Hopefully just having 1 worker process won't cause UBB to back up again, but we'll see