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My main BellaOnline forums are now fully on the new server. You can see it here -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php/forum_summary

In general they zip fairly quickly for a forum of 800,000 posts. The main page draws in 1.125 seconds.

I have a strange problem with making posts. It seems the first time a person posts in a given session it takes up to 15 full seconds while it sits on the posting screen. Then the follow-up screen (the one that shows the post) is nice and quick - a second or so.

If the person posts again - even on the same thread, which one would think would take just as long - it then becomes quick. A second or two. And even moving to other long threads is fine at that point. I can post in there quickly.

It seems to be something about their first post in a session. And unfortunately if that is really slow it discourages them from trying again so they don't realize it's a start-up anomaly.

Any thoughts about what might be different about a first post in a session? Are things being initialized? It's not a person with zero posts - even old timers who then go to make a first post seem to have this happen.

I'm open to all ideas. I thought it might be about posting to longer threads vs shorter ones but as I mentioned going back to that longer thread and posting again then goes nice and quick. So the forum isn't having problems adding posts in general, even to long threads.

I do need to upgrade the forum software; I'll do that tomorrow night. I have a lot of customizations with this so I want to do that when I'm more awake.


Lisa Shea, owner, BellaOnline.com
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What is the value for your php's memory_limit setting? (you can find this in the php info page in the control panel of the UBB).


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memory_limit is currently 128M

Should I increase that?

This new server has 4GB of ram.

in task manager 1.7GB are used by MS-SQL and 644MB are used by MySQL. Those are the two main things this server does - the BellaOnline content engine in MS-SQL and the forums in MySQL.

It's reporting using 86% of memory but only 5% of CPU. I suppose I don't worry about the memory too much, figuring it's using all it can which seems useful to me. But if I really have to I can ask about the cost of more memory. I.e. pretty much nothing else is using memory at all. These two are using all they want to.

Lisa

Last edited by BellaOnline; 04/27/2015 4:17 PM.

Lisa Shea, owner, BellaOnline.com
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Are you really running your site with only 4gb ram? That's the same amount I have for my entire VPS, and my sites aren't nearly as active as yours...

At this point, since it's more than likely a server resource issue, and that's outside the scope of user to user support on the forums, I'd advise contacting your host/data center regarding server tuning and recommendations on their end.


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My previous servers had less RAM smile. And they ran just fine. And heck the forums were more active back then, too. On a slower system.

This *is* an entire Windows 2012 VPS. I used to have a physical dedicated server until last fall when that hosting company stopped supporting them. So I transitioned to a new company with a VPS just for my site and forum. That one had serious issues, so I'm moving again, again to a VPS which is just for my site and forum. I log into it with remote desktop and manage it just like a "real server."

I can't imagine it's a server resource issue because it has to do with specific operations in the forums. I just woke up and went into the forums. My first post was dog-slow at 25 second. Second post? 1 second. It's not like the server was any different between those two operations. It has the same load and same memory and so on. Something different is going on with my forum activity between when I'm initializing my new session vs when I'm active within a session. So the question is, what operations take place when a user starts using UBB. What files are made and so on. Doesn't it create a new session when the user arrives and begins?


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For example, my sessions folder has 5700 items in it with gigantic names. All have current dates. Could it be something about the system having to go through those and deal with those while it's setting up the new space for the new active user? Or something else relating to that? There's an empty index.htm and index.html in there.

The only other directory with strange names like that is the /templates/compile which does have some files from 2012 in it. Should I delete out the pre-2015 compile files? Not that those would impact this issue, I'd guess, but if I'm in doing cleanup in preparation for the upgrade tonight I might as well poke around a bit.


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Unfortunately, none of us who I know that're handy have much/any experience with IIS; I did talk to Isaac and he mentioned that your Windows swap must be huge with that little ram, which could cause slowdown issues in itself.

templates/compile holds the compiled templates, as they're parsed.
cache/ holds some cache data relating to your forums
sessions/ will always be huge, as it holds session information for every user who accesses your site (guests and members).

The sessions folder is cleared by your webserver as needed.


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well I can say on a apache/linux server.
I can delete the files in templates/compile except for index.html.
Then run clear cache in ubb cp and they get rebuilt.


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OK I'll keep investigating on my own.

Again, the forums run blazing fast after you make that first post. There's no issue at all with general forum speed. The forums are quite fine. They are perfectly content with the system resources.

The only operation which seems to have a serious problem is making an initial post when you first arrive at the forum. So there has got to be something unique about that step of activity. I'll see if I can step through it and figure out what. I.e. how does it get assigned to a session ID? Maybe it's something as simple as the session ID tracking table is full of rows and isn't indexed.


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Originally Posted by Ruben
well I can say on a apache/linux server.
I can delete the files in templates/compile except for index.html.
Then run clear cache in ubb cp and they get rebuilt.

A swap file (or swap space or, in Windows NT, a pagefile) is a space on a hard disk used as the virtual memory extension of a computer's real memory (RAM).

Having a swap file allows your computer's operating system to pretend that you have more RAM than you actually do.

https://kb.iu.edu/d/aagb


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The session is generated when they access the site, not after the post.

There are several triggers (cache_builders/cache_trigger.php, libs/triggers.inc.php) that're checked and ran after a new post is made, but the issue wouldn't necessarily be the trigger, but the amount of data processed during a trigger, which with a large set of data and restricted resources could take a while; this is the case when more resources than needed comes in handy as it can handle a larger load with more resources.


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Ruben -

Thanks so much - that's sort of what I was hoping on the compile files.

I just deleted all the pre-April-2015 templates/compile files. That at least is a good cleanup action to take before I do the upgrades tonight. I'm currently on 7.5.7 and want to get these up to 7.5.9.


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FYI, I believe a lot was cleaned up in more recent versions of UBB.threads.

UBB.threads v7.5.8 Changelog


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id242 -

Thank you for the information. I'd always let the system manage the pagefile, figuring if it needed more it'd simply take it. I have plenty of space.

But I've gone in and manually increased that value from 1193mb (what it felt it currently needed) to 3583mb (its recommended new setting). I'll need to reboot it later on for that to take effect - I don't like to reboot midday with all our visitors on the system.

I just hate to toss hardware at a problem when in general the forums are flying. The coder in me wants to figure out what the specific issue is and fix it. It's just this one specific operation that is choking. If it's not the session-file-creation, then something else in the first-post-of-the-day must be the culprit. I need to figure out how that first post is unique compared with subsequent posts.


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Gizmo -

Certainly it's a fair enough point that I should hold off on a line-by-line evaluation until I upgrade, just in case smile. I love puzzles so I think this situation intrigues me. I must be patient.

I have plenty of other things to work on in the meantime. I spent the past three weeks redoing every single site in my library (except BellaOnline) to make them mobile friendly and there's lots of little loose ends to fix up. I've got a few more hours before I can begin the BellaOnline mail server move and this forum upgrade. Once those are done, I can pretty much shut down that old server and be done with MyHosting.

Thanks!


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Lisa,

1) Download the latest UBBT 7.5.9 from the member area.

2) Rename your current smarty directory from "libs/smarty" to "libs/smarty757"

3) Extract ubbthreads-7-5-9/libs/smarty from the 7.5.9 archive and place it in to your install as "libs/smarty"

That should help get you up and running.

UBBT 7.5.7 - Smarty v2.6.19
UBBT 7.5.9 - Smarty v2.6.28

If you have any problems after that, just remove the new directory and rename "libs/smarty757" back to "libs/smarty"

HISTORY: When i upgraded from Smarty v2.6.19 to the latest Smarty v2.6.28 several years ago, my forums no longer crawled. So then I pushed for the current UBB.threads maintainer (SD, at the time) to upgrade the included smarty version within his next release from 2.6.19 to 2.6.28. That release was UBB.threads 7.5.8. Since I am now a maintainer of the current version of UBB.threads, since v7.5.9, I am also using this updated version of Smarty with each release. Going forward, I will be looking to keep Smarty up to date with the v3 series. But this will require a bit more work and also that the base install of PHP be version 5.2 or newer, for Smarty v3 to work.


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Re; swap/paging files - It's always better to add physical memory rather than trying to emulate memory with a file located on a HDD/SDD. I cannot stress this enough, especially for mechanical drives (HDD).

Rather than playing with swap/paging file settings, get some more ram in your server.

In addition, while Windows Server 2012 minimum recommended RAM is only 512MB, you're probably aware that windows runs quite poor on that little amount of RAM. Simple tasks take forever to complete (ie; loading IE and navigating to Microsoft.com).

To expand one what James/Gizmo previously wrote -

Originally Posted by Gizmo
Are you really running your site with only 4gb ram? That's the same amount I have for my entire VPS, and my sites aren't nearly as active as yours...

At this point, since it's more than likely a server resource issue, and that's outside the scope of user to user support on the forums, I'd advise contacting your host/data center regarding server tuning and recommendations on their end.

When selecting the system specifications for a server solution, even the optimal system requirements recommendations from Microsoft might not suffice. It is a best practice to assess the server specifications of the planned server role while taking the load during the time of deployment and future growth into consideration. For example, a Windows Server 2012 system running the Windows Server 2012 Essentials will require 8GB of RAM to run adequately. Therefore, size the system accordingly and test the load before going live into production.

From what I know already, you have the most current versions of Apache, SQL, PHP and probably a few other services constantly running along side the base Windows Server services. And now you're trying to have over 200 concurrent connections (your users) all performing 10 to 1,000+ database requests at the same time, during your regular usage hours, on a Windows Server 2012 setup with only 4GB of RAM.

Last edited by id242; 04/27/2015 8:15 PM.

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I just upgraded to 7.5.9 and it has the same issue. In general they are zippingly fast. The *only* thing it has an issue is with that initial post.

If the whole system was slow, I could understand the RAM issues. And I did have them go up from 4 gig to 5 gig. Plus I have another 3 gig virtual. But I just can't see it's a RAM issue. Everything is fast everywhere. Everything in all my aspects of my site are fast.

The ONLY thing that is delaying is the initial post, and that's a 20-30 second delay. That doesn't seem like RAM. That seems like something else is wrong. Subsequent posts are fast. It goes from 20-30 seconds to one second and consistently stays at one second after that. We're not talking about a few seconds of swapping time slow. We're talking about something-going-wrong slow.

I've been a developer for over 20 years and I just resist throwing hardware at an issue, when I can't see it as a hardware issue.

On the smarty, didn't that happen as a normal part of this upgrade?


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Originally Posted by BellaOnline
If the whole system was slow, I could understand the RAM issues. And I did have them go up from 4 gig to 5 gig. Plus I have another 3 gig virtual. But I just can't see it's a RAM issue. Everything is fast everywhere. Everything in all my aspects of my site are fast.

5GB of ram on Windows Server 2012?
And 3GB of page file (virtual memory) which is Hard Drive based.

Something seems wrong with this server scenario.
"5GB" is a strange number for installed memory on a server-class system in 2015.

Considering the size of your forums and the SQL/PHP/APACHE... and other services you may be running at the same time;
As of April 28, 2015:
http://forums.bellaonline.com/
CATEGORIES: 400+
TOPICS: 105,780+
POSTS: 740,778+
USERS: 57,614

I'm going to take a rough guess here, but your MySQL Disk Space is probably at least 1GB just for your forum alone, with your POSTS table being about 90% (900MB) of that.


Originally Posted by BellaOnline
I've been a developer for over 20 years

If you're not letting your Windows Server 2012 automatically control your page file (virtual memory), at least match it to the same amount of physical memory you have installed on it. Though, dating back to Windows NT 4.0, for the past 20 years (since mid 1996 IIRC), the common recommendation when manually managing a page file is to make the page file 1.5 times the size of the installed RAM. Although Windows Server will allow you to operate without a paging file, this is not recommended since you may lose unwritten cached data and log files in the event of a power fault.

As a side note; Is your server using a 5400 RPM HDD or is it 7200 RPM? The slower the HD, the slower your system will be when it interacts with that page file no matter what positive size you have it set to. This will also affect your SQL queries.

Some forum interactions get cached (TOPIC VIEWS and SEARCH RESULTS in the DB, WHOSONLINE in RAM). Some interactions are heavy on the DB and dont get cached for obvious reasons. Though searches do get cached in the DB through RAM, any two people searching for identical keywords are rare. Searches on massive databases will cause some forum servers to completely halt until the search limit is reached or the query is has completed on the whole post DB. Another time when a forum may grind to a halt until the process is completed is when a new post is created (or one is edited) that causes the TOPIC_VIEWS table to update the TOPICS table.

If your forum has very little RAM or is running on slow hardware/drives, new posts/replies will be delayed for as long as it takes for the server to write out the TOPIC_VIEWS table to the TOPICS table. The duration of that delay will vary depending on if a lot of topics have been viewed between the said post/edit.

---

You also previously mentioned that on your prior servers (through a different hosting company), you had some custom php.ini settings that you did not backup when you moved over to your new server is hosted at.

Were you also running PHP 5.5 on that prior host? or was it PHP 5.3/5.4?
Are you using a different version of MySQL now?
How much memory did you have installed with that host? What was the page file size you had then?

If you did not change the scripts that you're using, but you did change the services or the hardware configurations, what are those differences?

Again, as James/Gizmo previously stated -

Originally Posted by Gizmo
At this point, since it's more than likely a server resource issue, and that's outside the scope of user to user support on the forums, I'd advise contacting your host/data center regarding server tuning and recommendations on their end.


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FWIW, I JUST (like a week ago) upgraded the servers (CentOS6, Linux (De-branded RHEL)) for two clients who ultimately use them for one site each:

Client Alpha
52,715 Registered Members
72 Forums
674,845 Topics
9,734,647 Posts
99 GB Ram, 4 CPU 2.4 GHz with 6 Cores per CPU

Client Bravo
33,947 Registered Members
72 Forums
190,344 Topics
2,783,777 Posts
74 GB Ram, 4 CPU 2.8 Ghz with 6 Cores per CPU

Heck, even my tiny VPS is 4 GB Ram, 2 GHz CPU with 4 Cores.

The goal is to have as little swap/page file usage as possible, which is achieved by adding additional memory, as when the page/swap space is used it can (and will) slow the system until resources are freed; on a Unix/Linux system you'd check this by simply looking at your iowait and swap usage.


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If I think way back to 2003 or so, I was on a shared server and experienced a lot of what Lisa is seeing. A search would shut the board down, and posting was very slow. If I went in and killed processes, the board would start running again, until more activity. It was so long ago that I don't remember the specs on the server, but it was the push I needed to move to a dedicated server. Once I moved, I never looked back.

Last edited by SteveS; 04/29/2015 6:41 PM.

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