UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone Our Message Boards keep crashing!

First a little history, we have been on UBB since 1999, we are approaching 1 million posts and have 31,000 registered users.

In the summer of 2007 we upgraded from classic to UBBThreads 7.2 and have not upgraded since. Our posts have not been pruned (and I have been advised not to do so) since 1999.

Our host is trying to move us over to a virtual server, to host the other side of our site as well as our Message Boards. For about 2 weeks now, our boards have been up and down A LOT! This also coincides with when we launched our Photo Galleries as well.

I'm at a loss, as to what we can do to optimize the boards. Currently they are backing up our database 4 times a day, but the is also slowing the Boards down to a halt.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Although it is really nice to show a high member count and a very high post count to achieve the prestige of being a dominant message board around since the beginning of time.....


I think it is time to cut the cord and purge about 8 years of inactive members and post's on your message board.

A few things I am noticing on your post is your backing up 4 times a day, why? This puts stress on your server. If your on of those sites hosted on one of those unlimited places with a CPU meter or resource meter then your most likely being shut down for resource hogging unless your totally dedicated hosted.

If you plan to keep all that data I would suggest your own dedicated box.

I'm all for purging old members, but I for one don't like pruning forum content. I'd go say purge items that are worthless (like our "tempting" thread here at central) but keep quality information.

Honestly, standard hosting is outside of the scope for a forum of your size, dedicated resources are likely a nessessity at some point in every communities life...

And why backup 4 times a day? that can be causing a LOT of lag... Honestly, is your data so important that it exceeds a need of a WEEKLY backup schedual?

I just tried your link in your signature and got a ubb error. Database error.
When I refreshed it was working.
So first suggestion is turn on logs in the ubb control panel so you can see what the problem is.
It could be anything such as server down,Bla Bla.
Then you can view the errors in cp>>Logs

Have a look at INNODB and hot copy. It's a rolling backup. Using mysqldump 4 times a day will kill your site (obviously). You're locking the tables while mysqldump dumps over a million posts. That probably takes 2 hours or more. 4 times a day. So, for 8 hours a day your database is locked. No wonder it's dead most of the time. Look into alternate methods of backing up this data. Seriously.

Of course a huge and significant prune would also fix it, but that's a different discussion.

Hi everyone.

I also work for the same site and I wanted to mention that the problems we are having are new. The post count and member count have not caused problems up until about 1 month ago. During this time we had a problem with the Ram on the server, replaced it and had another problem. Then the site was moved to a temporary machine and today it was moved to a new virtual environment.

One of the guys who works on the site wonders if maybe the database is not configured properly to maximize performace.

Just seems funny that these problems are recent and quite possibly a hardware and maybe configuration problem.

?? Helen

Well, the generic database configuration for MySQL is not normally optimized for how much memory is on the server (it's literally generic). Now, unless your host has tuned this for server specifics, i doubt it's configured properly.

Though, as dave (and I) previously mentioned, backing up that often is going to bottleneck your server.

Actually, you can run mysqldump without locking the tables:


However, I must agree that 4 times a day is way too much. I would do only a nightly backup.

I think they are doing a site-wide backup which includes the boards so we will have to ask if we can reduce that.

The funny thing is though - until a month a go - they were doing the same backups but we were NOT experiencing any lag at all. This has to have some direct connection to the new server and temporary server more than the backups considering they were not a problem before these new developments.

Helen

For MySQL configuration help, take a look at mysqltuner. While it won't guide you to the perfect config it will at least give you some basic recommendations for things to change, especially if you're running the stock MySQL config.

I will agree, mysqltuner is a great first step to tuning mysql