UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 6 Version 6 Support Severe Slowdown of forums at www.dancescape.com/mydancefriends ...

Hello,
Some of our members are reporting a severe slowdown in the forums, with pages taking minutes to come up, rather than near instataneous previously.

Could you please advise if the info. below may help indicate whether it is the software, or perhaps their service provider<?>.

Our forums are at www.dancescape.com/mydancefriends, and the report of this is in the thread about our FOrums Upgrade.


Thanks for any feedback.


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QUOTE FROM A USER:

I use a Mac PowerBook G4 running Mac OSX and Mozilla, and also Internet Explorer. I noticed a severe degredation of performance after the upgrade, and I have not cleared my cache. Usually, pages load nearly instantaneously (I have a T-1 equivalent speed DSL line). Last time this happened you had also moved some servers around so some IP addresses changed, and this caused a slowdown as the new adressing information propagated.

As of 3pm pacific time December 10, I've noticed an improvement in page load time...what was taking nearly a minute to load this morning is now taking about 15 seconds. This is still a far cry from the near-instantaneous reponse that I was getting before the upgrade. Do you still have the same number of servers responding as before? The same number of database servers? The same number of image servers? The people who are experiencing a slowdown aren't making it up, unless we both happen to be on a part of the network that is somehow partitioned from yours.

Here's a traceroute from my laptop to www.dancescape.com (I've deleted my own IP address from the first entry for secruity reasons):

1% traceroute www.dancescape.com
traceroute to www.dancescape.com (24.215.43.91), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 m y l a p t o p 3.414 ms 3.213 ms 2.982 ms
2 m y g a t e w a y t o s p e a k e a s y 15.598 ms 13.081 ms 12.012 ms
3 border5.g3-4.speakeasy-29.sfo.pnap.net (63.251.53.219) 12.708 ms 12.469 ms 13.71 ms
4 core3.ge2-0-bbnet1.sfo.pnap.net (63.251.63.3) 12.476 ms 12.826 ms 11.858 ms
5 140.174.28.93 (140.174.28.93) 12.782 ms 12.301 ms 13.675 ms
6 p4-0-1-0.r00.snjsca04.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.16.17) 15.515 ms p4-1-1-0.r00.snjsca04.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.16.20) 14.885 ms 14.166 ms
7 p16-0-1-0.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.3.86) 17.931 ms 15.687 ms 16.363 ms
8 p64-0-0-0.r20.plalca01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.2.70) 21.565 ms 16.092 ms 17.068 ms
9 p16-0-0-0.r00.plalca01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.3.79) 20.109 ms 15.587 ms 16.918 ms
10 p4-0.uunet.plalca01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.9.98) 19.787 ms 18.215 ms 17.272 ms
11 0.so-2-0-0.xl2.sac1.alter.net (152.63.53.6) 17.292 ms 18.629 ms 17.643 ms
12 0.so-3-0-0.tl2.sac1.alter.net (152.63.54.10) 17.905 ms 17.745 ms 17.684 ms
13 0.so-7-0-0.tl2.tor2.alter.net (152.63.2.101) 79.794 ms 83.024 ms 80.272 ms
14 pos1-0.xr2.tor2.alter.net (152.63.2.78) 86.519 ms 83.049 ms 80.742 ms
15 194.atm7-0.gw2.ham1.alter.net (152.63.132.205) 88.305 ms 87.479 ms 87.376 ms
16 edap3-gw.customer.alter.net (205.150.100.102) 89.346 ms 89.579 ms 88.598 ms
17 mountain-0-r.ptp.edaptivity.com (24.244.192.10) 97.157 ms 90.853 ms 91.717 ms
18 24.215.43.91 (24.215.43.91) 89.965 ms 88.232 ms 91.562 ms

To help track down where the actual slowdown is coming from, try adding &debug=1 to the end of a couple of your urls.

Like:

http://www.dancescape.com//ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?Cat=&debug=1

This will give you a breakdown of each query made and the time it takes to execute. This will help track if it's a specific query, the mysql server itself or general server speed.

Another thing you can do is turn on debugging in the config file. This will make it so page generation times are displayed in the footer of each page. This your users can see, and they can report if the slow times are due to mysql or just general page load times with the information.

Can you run the following sql command and let me know what you get back:

SHOW KEYS FROM w3t_Last

Hello,
Here is the result of the query:

Table Non_unique Key_name Seq_in_index Column_name Collation Cardinality Sub_part Packed Comment
w3t_Last 0 PRIMARY 1 L_Uid A
w3t_Last 0 PRIMARY 2 L_Board A 5855

Ok, so your index exists properly so you'll want to read the 2 posts I made before that and try those.

Hello,
I've done a few of the &debug=1 -- how does one tell where the problem would be? Is it by the times indicated?

Also, someone indicated the following:

******************
I'm thinking that they've changed how the tables on the list of active topics page are set up. Browser render time for tables does not increase linerarly as the complexity of the tables increases -- it's not as bad as exponentially, but it's definitely not linear (I know this from work I used to do on high-traffic/high-performance/high-availabilty web sites such as the long-gone Infoseek). I get everything in the head of the page up to the Christmas tree immediately, and then I have to wait another 10-30 seconds (at this point...6:30pm) while the rest of the table renders. All the images are cached locally, so it's not a matter of image download time in my case.

**********************

I also noticed, with Eve/the infopop forums, it has also been slower getting on the Infopop forums from the main page at www.infopop.com -- when I click on "COMMUNITY", it has been taking over 1 minute to load, and then from there it takes another minute or so to get into this area. I have to keep clicking on "Community" sometimes as it has timed out.

Also, in clicking on the specific topic on these forums, it loads, but has been a slower as well.

I use a fast pc, Internet Explorer 6.0, Windows XP, and on broadband connection.

Do you think it has anything also to do with caching?

I've turned on the debugging ... it indicates that "Zlib compression disabled" -- should this be enabled?

[This message was edited by Dance on December 11, 2003 at 09:08 AM.]

Yes, you're looking at the times indicated. Normally they should be well under a hundredth of a second. If there is a specific query that is taking up a chunk of the time then that would help pinpoint it.

If you turn on debugging in the config file then it will also give you a total, for how long the page took to generate and how much of that was taken up by mysql. That would help to figure out if it's mysql or the webserver causing the slowdown.

No table changes were made between 6.3.2 and 6.4. Same design structure is intact.

Enabling zlib compression might be something you can try. It will tax your server a little bit more but it will make the page sizes smaller as it will compress the page before delivering it to the browser. You'll want to turn on the debugging in the config file before trying this so you can note any time changes.

Hello,
Here is the page that is being reported as slow: it is the "Today's Active Topics" page (where does this appear<?>)...

Could you advise what the issue may be...


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This is for page
http://www.dancescape.com//ubbthrea...=Entire+Phrase&Old=1day&Limit=50
(i.e., the "Today's Active Topics" page)

Machine: Mac PowerBook G4 running Mac OSX 10.2.8
Internet Connection: High-speed (T-1 equivalent) dedicated DSL with
a static IP address

Using Mozilla 1.5 at 9:12am Pacific, Thurs. Dec. 11:
Generated in 24.499 seconds in which 23.369 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

Using Mozilla 1.5 at 9:13am:
Generated in 23.577 seconds in which 22.281 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:15am, using Internet Explorer 5.2:
Generated in 25.382 seconds in which 23.136 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:25am, using Internet Explorer 5.2:
Generated in 27.621 seconds in which 24.422 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:30am, using Safari 1.0.1:
Generated in 27.694 seconds in which 25.246 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:32am, using Safari 1.0.1:
Generated in 24.555 seconds in which 23.651 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:42am, using Lynx 2.8.4 on FreeBSD on a box at a major colo so it has better-than-T1-speed
Generated in 35.522 seconds in which 33.922 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

At 9:44am, using Lynx 2.8.4 on FreeBSD on a box at a major colo so it has better-than-T1-speed
Generated in 25.288 seconds in which 24.152 seconds were spent on a total of 4 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

Note that when using Lynx I get a message saying "stalled for 24 seconds" while downloading this page.

Other pages -- such as this one -- are pretty much instantaneous:
(At 9:51am) Generated in 2.99 seconds in which 0.147 seconds were spent on a total of 13 queries. Zlib compression disabled.

Ok, on the search page your slowdown is definitely coming from mysql. Averaging well over 20 seconds to do the queries necessary for the recent posts. I see that you're returning 50 results on this. You might try running this down quite a bit to around 10-20 to see if that helps for that specific page. The search pages definitely hit the mysql server the hardest out of all of them.

The last one, very little of the time was taken by mysql, 0.147, but it still took close to 3 seconds to generate the page and deliver it which is still fairly slow.

Any idea on your server specs? Memory, CPU, etc.

Try the same thing on a few other of the pages like, the main forum listing, the postlist and a couple of topics to see what type of results you get.

Hi there,
Where do we set this to 10-20 -- is it on the Admin area and which section?

The server specs are:
PII 400
40 GIG
256MB Ram

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="">quote:</font><hr /><font size="" face="">Originally posted by Rick Baker:
I see that you're returning 50 results on this. You might try running this down quite a bit to around 10-20 to see if that helps for that specific page. The search pages definitely hit the mysql server the hardest out of all of them.

Any idea on your server specs? Memory, CPU, etc.

</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="" face="">

That actually is hardcoded into the dosearch.php script on about line 95. There is a line that should look like this:

if (!$Limit) { $Limit = 25;}

Yours probably has a 50 there. You can change it to a lower number.

With your server specs you're definitely going to want to bump that down quite a bit. For any mysql application that gets a fair amount of use, memory is one of the key components. mysql LOVES memory, the more the better. Most users will at least have a GIG of memory for the server.

What will happen is your forum will gradually slow down the more users/posts/messages are stored in the database. If upgrading the server, throwing more memory at it, etc. is not an option then you'll want to look at activiely pruning topics and private messages to keep the total amount stored in the database down to a reasonable amount.