UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Version 7 Support UBB on Mirrored MySQL servers

Here we grow again! This question pertains to www.markeedragon.com that is running UBB 7.2.2. We just upgraded to using multiple load balanced web servers and a dedicated MySQL server. We are having 8 second average load times on the forums. 4 seconds of this is the template we use. It's very image heavy. The other 4 seconds is ubbthreads.php. I've seen other threads talk about the DB being the biggest factor in performance for the forums.

We are already running on a dual core Xeon server with mirrored drives and 4gb of memory. We are sometimes getting slammed during peak hours. God forbid we get Slashdotted or or Dugg. We have seen just shy of 4000 simotanious people in the forums when this happens.

So this is a long build up to the question of is we could benefit from running mirrored MySQL servers. Having them load balanced? It's a function of MySQL and I don't think any special support is needed from UBB to support this.

Does anyone see any issues with this? Does anyone use multiple mirrored DB servers? We do plan on doing this even if we just mirror the servers but all of the calls still go to just one. That way if a master server fails the slave can pick up and keep going.

Anyway. Any advise or experience shared would be appreciated.

This is a good time for me to ask if you're spent time tuning MySQL really well?

(mostly because I've never done mirrored MySQL stuff with PHP)

Some information is old but very interesting reading on large scale computing

On 1 March 2006, the English Wikipedia hit 1,000,000 articles. On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia hit 2,000,000 articles.

Wikimedia servers
Wikimedia servers


Goog article on things LiveJournal ran into during it's growth
mysql-slides.pdf

Wikipedia:Technical FAQ
Wikipedia:Technical FAQ

The Wiki stuff is interesting. We may be headed in that direction. Right now we are at 6 servers. we have two DB servers that Flash backup to each other. What we need to do now is to run a master and a bunch of slaves. I was thinking of adding just one DB server and doing Master Slave with just the UBB DB. But we have a lot of custom 3rd party stuff we've built and we actually have around 40dbs total. If I'm going to Master Slave the UBB DB I may as well do the rest of them because it will give us some good hardware failure protection.

The new servers will cost around 2k each but we would loose more then that in revenue if we were down for half a day. So it's easy insurance.

From the looks of it none of you have done this before with your UBB DBs. So I'll be sure to report how it goes.

One other side note. In reference to the Wiki article about server names. Yahoo names servers after plants, Wiki it looks like they had a naming convention but started naming them by function. I previously worked at Nike and they named servers after food.

We name ours after famous video game characters. If I'm adding a pair maybe they can be Mario and Luigi. Our data plumbers.

At my regular jobsite everything has the name of a rollercoaster. And we sort of handpick the names.

Our wsus server is called okiedokie, and it's basicly updating workstations getting them okiedokie again. The server with the workstation images is flashback, camera logging nighthawk, our BIG video file storage (I work for a broadcasting network) blackhole etc.

I just hate functional names

Oh, and if we add pairs, we make sure they are the names of a dueling coaster so they fit together