UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support 6.5.0 Scalability Question / Slowness

Hello Folks,

Got a quick question about the scalability of UBB. One of the things that I've noticed in recent weeks is that one forum in particular of mine has slowed down drastically. This is both with loading and especially with posting to it. There's about 6000 threads in that forum, and the default topic view is 45 days, 40 threads per page or so. The board itself is doing about 10-12k hits per day.

I've been investigating doing improvments an basically a duplicate of the machine I have in production.

I've turned on mod_gzip and this has improved the load speed of the board while lowering my bandwidth overhead.

I've gone in on the test machine and increased the file buffer cache, increased the network sockets and etc. This has had little if any effect.

I've been using the system tools and I'm not seing high disk utilization, very little in fact. The amount of memory I'm using is approximately 100M out of 1G.

The CPU doesn't appear to be too overworked but I fear it may be getting a bit long in the tooth.

I've done tests locally with PHP acceleration and it does in fact make the board more responsive in so far as pulling up threads and reads. However posting still takes 5-15 seconds on a good day.

There's two more things I know for sure that I'm going to try on the test machine, and I'm looking for more suggestions.

1. Increase the CPU speed, simply put I have another machine which I'm going to test to see if this has any effect.

2. Too many topics in one forum. I'm trying to narrow down whether or not this is due to too many files in the directory even though the OS is said to not have any complications until you get to 65535^16 files per directory. The aspect I'm looking into is a that the CPU just has too much junk to crunch in one directory.

I try not to otherwise alter the board / break bookmarks / adjust the layout. I'm trying to keep this the same as much as possible. The users will be understanding however there's no need to swat a fly with a cannonball.

I'm running a *BSD OS uniproccessor, would I benefit from stuffing a second one in?

Moving topics from one forum to another and letting that one be 'slow' or on another machine even would be more acceptible than upgrading to UBB threads unless it was absolutely neccessary.

I also have some hesitations in installing PHP acceleration in case there are some migration issues with moving to UBB threads. I'm trying to cover as many bases on a test machine before I go making an investment in hardware or software that I don't need.

I appreciate any input that people have, I'm using http_load in the lab to simulate vast amounts of traffic.

Thanks!

#2 above is your primary culprit - it's a combination of the number of files in the directory and the size of the data that needs to be loaded on each request. Using the Mass Move tool to leave that forum with only a thousand or two topics will result in a noticable performance increase without any loss of data.

There are no migration issues involving the Accelerator - go turn it on. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

And, of course, upgrading the server itself will always speed things up. Concentrating on disk I/O will be your best bet if you'll be staying with UBB.classic in the long term. If you're using IDE disks, look at going SCSI, or at least to a good hardware IDE RAID. (Yes, the I/O speed will matter, even if it doesn't look like it does now.)

What sort of performance are you trying to achieve? For users on dedicated servers, we generally advise moving off to UBB.threads or UBB.x at or above the one-two million pageview per month level. (On shared, we advise going to dedicated or to UBB.threads/UBB.x at around half a million.) Scaling the 6-series much higher than that is very difficult due to the limitations of what can be pulled off using flat files alone. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Hello Charles,

Thank you for responding. I'm currently on a single 933/1G PC133/U160 7200RPM 9.1G disk. I'm on my own server in my own rack. This machine handles the board itself, I have others for DNS/Postfix.

I know that one day it will come where I need to move up to threads as well as upgrade the server. Probably the latter before the fomer.

I've been beating on a local machine here which is an 800/768M PC133/ATA100 5400RPM 20G disk. I've been putting more and less ram in as well as using the slower disk to try to see if I am getting disk waits on the processes, resource starvation due to lack of optimization, etc. Whereas I'm not a fan of IDE for producton use, if I need more CPU and less disk I'd rather have it that way.

I'm going to try to load the board entirely into a ramdisk into memory, it should prove interesting to say the least. This should define what factor the disk plays in it.

Do you have a tool that you use in-house to simulate board traffic?

Thanks!

Classic on a ramdisk absolutely flies - I tried it out about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, it's not exactly a practical solution for most people. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

All the tools we have for testing in-house are more targeted at stressing the server than actually determining application performance for UBB.classic or UBB.threads. (There is internal performance testing for UBB.x/eve.) Our general advice and guidelines for performance come from the past three years on the 6-series architecture and real world performance rather than artificial benchmarks.

Hello Charles,

There's a setup with to do it with OpenBSD with ramdisk ala raid, so you can sync it up. I always worry about power loss / memory corruption / heat buildup. The board itself including cache files is maybe I'd say 30-40 megs between HTML and CGI.

I was playing with http_load internally just as a was to attempt to stress the server. I have it pulling up the first 40 threads and another ten or so from the rest of the forum, and then a 1-2 searches. In so far as synthetic benchmarks go the connect speed and transfer rate has gone up 16-20 times with PHP acceleration. I think I've got a 350M IDE flash drive out of an old Cisco CSS11000 Content Server, I should play with that and or get a 500meg solid state disk.

My last question is lets say I move the threads that haven't been touched in 90 days to another forum. In there people may respond to them. Such a time comes later on where I upgrade the machine and I want to re-consolidate all the threads back into one forum. Is this possible to do? And will the fact that people can still post to them mung it up bad?

I've been looking to upgrade to the latest stable version, but I've been reluctant to do so since it's got your spider hack in it and I know it'd
get bopped without PHP acceleration.

One last question, lets say I decide to turn PHP acceleration off for whatever reason, IE I want to run apache chroot'ed in a jail and I haven't gotten PHP setup with static libs properly yet, or there's a security issue with PHP. What will happen to those old bookmarks, and or to the board if I were to turn it off? I seem to see a post furthur down somewheres it was the case and it appeared to create a good deal of havoc?

Thanks,

thepantlessone

From my experience you can move threads from one forum to another and vice versa without any problem... (that is, ofcourse, if you don't keep a copy of the moved thread in your source forum)

You can disable Spider hack from the control panel, if you wish. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Don't tell me about disabling spider hack <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I need a kick in the pants to install PHP, which I should have done from the beginning but didn't have time.

Thanks,

--pants

Once you turn on the Accelerator, it's difficult to go back - users tend to bookmark it. If PHP remains installed, but the Accelerator is turned off, it will instead redirect the users to the board. However, if you remove PHP, then the Accelerator breaks entirely.

Hrm, I moved some threads on a test machine but the performance still sucks?

What am I missing? I'm rebuilding the search, user histories, do I need to clear my cache?

Thanks,

sanspants

Charles, basically you have tools that do a bunch of disk read writes on the server, some network connnections, and some tasks that eat some CPU and then test the board from there?

Also one more question, it still says I have the same amount of posts that I did before I moved 3/4 of the posts on the test server, not only that it also seems to take forever to do maintenance?

Thanks,

sinpantalones

Alright, I just realized something, I didn't delete the old threads out of the forum.

Unpacked the old tar ball, tried again, deleted, got it down from about 5000 to 800. Cleared cache, rebuilt forum stat files for source and destination of move, rebuilt search index, and post histories.

It's still like watching two old people... open a jar of pickles. What am I missing here?

Thanks,

nopants

Blame it on the pickles.

Please open up a support ticket complete with FTP info and the URL to this topic (and a note asking that the ticket be assigned to me). The board should not have remained slow after you removed those topics.

Hello Charles,

So far I've only done this on a TEST server. I can put it on an external IP, but I don't know if this is going to help you any or if you need to look at the production server.

Thanks,

nopants

If the behavior is the same on both, then looking at the test server is almost as good as the production server.