UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Performance issues?

My boards are starting to experience significant delays at busy times of day - I'm wondering if there are any 'rule of thumb' performance considerations / enhancements / resolutions / ...

(Dedicated server - windows - and I have 25+ years in the software industry.. I am fairly comfortable with this stuff)

A couple of years ago I recall 5000 being suggested as a limit for a post count total in any forum - but I see so many forums exceed that... and I do too in most of my forums.. What sort of impact / hit are the long forums? Threads?
(I mean - I/O? CPU? Memory? locking bottlenecks? ?)

I limit threads to 200 posts.. Is this reasonable? I'm thinking the CPU for long threads was an issue?

I know the 'recent visitors' is a hit on system resources (I saw that when I implemented it
'back when' - how much - my visitors like to see this, but faster response would be better too.

I recall reading the I/O locking mechanism was the real longer term bottleneck for forum performance as activity grows - I'm not at the 3,000,000 + pages a month number (yet), but ??

My forums continue to grow - 2-3GB a day bandwidth right now, 10-20% growth a month.

Last fall I watched another large BB (similar in size and activity to mine) upgrade to Threads, and it has been a spectacular disaster for them. I do not see any upgrade path for me? (I can not afford the outages or the problems they had - I have nearly 30 paying sponsors)

Thanks for any suggestions here..

Bob

I assume these are your boards?

http://bobdunsire.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

You're generally following the guidelines as far as limits go... Each forum should have only a few thousand topics within it - the posts don't count, just the topics. The Beer Tent forum is a bit on the large side, though.

You also only have a few thousand registered users...

I notice you aren't using the Accelerator. Turning that on will increase performance greatly. A quick peek at the test script seems to indicate that you don't have PHP installed. You'll need to get that fixed. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Once you have enabled the Accelerator, go into the Forum Settings for each forum, and force each forum to Show All Topics. This will increase cache hits quite a bit (thus improving performance), at the cost of a little bandwidth.

How many pageviews did the board receive last month according to the control panel? If you don't recall, what's the current figure? (Yes, it's been only a day or two, but we can guestimate traffic from there...)

Yes Charles, that's the board.

Ah - the limit is threads, not posts.. I was obviously confused there.. So, the 5000 number I've seen in the past is not actually an issue for me (yet)..

The number of registered users is way below the threshold of 10K I know, and I see so many other boards with more posts, more members, more active - so the slowing performance of mine is an issue / concern..

Accelerator? PHP installed - I have been running the boards for about 2.5 years - always on a windows server, and never with PHP, and performance has not been an issue in the past - growth has been very steady (10-15% a month) - what will PHP get me? What are the risks? (is it stable? does is play nicely with windows? ??)

Looking at the server performance in detail I see CPU pegged for long periods of time, I/O and memory seems not to be issues..

The accelerator is coded in PHP, hence the need for PHP to run it. The Accelerator will take any load issues down by a large amount (in my boards case it was by about a half). I've not had an issue with stability concerning PHP; it's a web programming language that's been worked on for years, and it should play with Windows just as easily as Perl does.

The only possible problem would be users bookmarking pages served by the Accelerator - when they come back, they might not get assigned the session cookie to do new post indication. Though that will be fixed automatically as they browse the rest of the board.

If you can give me the pageview count, then I can give you a good idea at how many pages will be served by the Accelerator on your board...

Thanks very much Charles and Gizmo, I have installed PHP on my server, and enabled the accelerator.

I'm guessing this is really the only thing one can do to address performance issues? The thread size, forum size, etc are not (?) big items related to performance?

I guess I am more than a bit worried - what happens when I run out of gas with the accelerated boards - It will be nice to save $$ on bandwidth for a while (I pay a premium for everything over 20GB - and that doesn't even last me a week), but if my stuff continues on the path it has been on for the past 30 months.. ?? oh no?

Thanks again..
Bob

Performance is determined by three things:

1) The amount of data present
2) The number of people visiting
3) The server hardware & configuration

Any one of these three things impacts performance.

The more data present, the more work the code has to do (and the more work the operating system has to do for the code) in order to do simple things. A board with 10,000 member records will perform noticably slower than a board with only 1,000. A forum with 5,000 topics will perform slower than a forum with 500. In fact, a single really large, really popular forum can drag down the entire board.

Why? That's point number two. UBB uses some majorly overkill file locking methods in an attempt to ensure data consistancy. In short, only one request from one user can be handled at a time. A really, really large board with only a handful of users browsing (say, a dozen requests a minute during prime time) will perform better than a really small board with LOTS of users visiting (say, two requests every second during prime time).

Because requests to larger forums are slower, a single long-running request by a single user can cause massive delays for everyone else. (This is why we advise turning off Recent Visitors - it's SLOW.)

Very, very good server hardware can offset much of the data and user-related performance problems, to a point. We've had 6-series boards receive up to three million monthly pageviews, with the assistance of the Accelerator. The three million mark is the current performance plateau for the 6-series.

If you could give me that pageview number from your control panel, I could give you some solid recommendations as to what to do with further growth. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Charles,
my forum has over 6 million monthly pageviews and has crashed a couple of times in the past week:
http://www.superiorpics.com/cgi-bin/ultimate/ubb/ultimatebb.php

I take it that you would recommend upgrading to UBB.Threads? If so, would the forum be pretty similar? And does UBB.Threads have all of the functionality of UBB.Classic and more?

Let's keep this to your existing topic, chuckee. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I just wanted your opinion on it Charles that's all... could you post in my other topic?