Downtime and Upgrades

[Spokavriel]

Considering my problems with marking threads read since the "Optimization" I'm guessing it only made changes to database entries made by the forum post upgrade.

[Crescent Pulsar]

It seems like it's difficult to make new post indicators go away after browsing the new post. I kind of rely on them to know what's new, so it's kind of irritating to check and make sure and find out it's something I've already seen. <_<;

[lwf58]

The tweaking I did was around 10:00 pm Central time last night, so problems you may have had yesterday were not a result of that.

[Stacy]

It might just be a matter of having so many legacy messages in our databases that the server is having problems dealing with them all. I really don't know enough about bulletin boards to know if there's some sort of practical limit. Since I just got done trimming the user list, it doesn't seem likely that having too many users was the cause. After all, there are much larger boards that we are running out there.

It isn't. Messages are only processed when they're needed, so old ones sitting about doesn't hurt anything. The only reason a large number of posts would slow things down is lots of fulltext searching, and even then it's MySQL's fault and not that of phpBB. As far as a post limit... 16,777,215. That's how many unique IDs a post could have. Right now we're at about 261,385. I wouldn't worry about post counts anytime soon.

[Spokavriel]

About 10 central is when all the posts since the upgrade switched to displaying themselves unread. And ever since then if I have had the last post on a board the new post indicator icon on the index page won't go away without hitting the Mark All Read for the entire forum.

[lwf58]

Okay. I changed a couple of settings back to what they were before to try and get the read/unread working properly again. The change I made was supposed to move tracking read/unread to cookies instead of having a database track 'em.

[talonhunter]

The good news is...I can FINALLY use my iPhone to read posts on the site...only when i go to post, it wont let me stay logged in to write a post. Not necessarily a bad thing mind you, but it can be a little annoying when all I have out at the time is my phone. If it's a compatibility glich, then I can live with needing to break out the Air card and laptop to post, but if it is fixable, then it would be greatly loved by those of use who use these (pretentious and insane) devices. Thanks for what you do

[lwf58]

Okay, we finally have a straight answer about the spate of site outages this year. It seems that our site is causing other sites on our server to experience slowdowns, and when that happens, the hosting company changes permissions on our site database to fix the problems they are having. Josh, Stacy and I are talking over possible solutions.

[PCHeintz72]

Wierd... as big as this site is... I would not have thought it to get enough forum traffic to slow down most ISP servers. Afterall, there are plenty of high volume forums out there. I myself go to a couple of forums that are a lot larger. TFF comes to mind.

[Spokavriel]

From what I have been told the ISP's server is rather underpowered in processing and data handling capabilities. Hamstringed by being built with 1GB of Ram That would have been ok in 2003 if you are hosting multiple sites through the same processor but it's still rather low for anything more recent.

[lwf58]

It's not the traffic. We don't even have the kind of traffic we had a year or two ago. There's just something about the site that's causing the server to use more CPU time for it than the hosting company likes. I don't know what the limit is, since it's not mentioned in the TOS, but other hosting companies list 10% CPU usage in theirs.

One of my options is to have them move fukufics to a VPS (virtual private server), which would give us 100% dedicated resources. That would end the problems we are having now and save us the hassle of finding a new hosting company that's worth a hoot and then moving to it. Finding a host is a real concern, because there are hundreds of them out there that promise the moon and stars for really low rates and then don't deliver. Current problems aside, the company we are with has been pretty reliable for the years we've been with them.

That'd double my monthly costs for the site, but I'm thinking it might be worth it.

[Sky]

It's not the traffic. We don't even have the kind of traffic we had a year or two ago. There's just something about the site that's causing the server to use more CPU time for it than the hosting company likes. I don't know what the limit is, since it's not mentioned in the TOS, but other hosting companies list 10% CPU usage in theirs.

Weird. Has the move to phpBB 3 helped at all? Could you move to MySQL 5?

Do your Apache/IIS logs indicate any kind of correlation between who (or what) is browsing the site when Fukufics starts burning CPU?

[lwf58]

You may or may not have noticed a break in service due to the domain name expiring. No worries. It happened because the domain registration was tied to an expired credit card, and that's been dealt with, and as you can see, the site's back up and running normally again.

So nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.

[Dumbledork]

You may or may not have noticed a break in service due to the domain name expiring. No worries. It happened because the domain registration was tied to an expired credit card, and that's been dealt with, and as you can see, the site's back up and running normally again.

So nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.

LOL. And here I had thought someone had hijacked the webpage.

[Spokavriel]

I was worried that the expiration provided the possibility for the site to become hijacked.