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Scaling Issue

DarthGrozniiDarthGroznii
edited November 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Issue is as follows:

1. Forum Database of over 300 MB in size; MySQL seems to store it happily.

2. Vanilla 1.1.4 installed.

Performance with or without extensions enabled was very slow; as the database grew, the problem grew worse. Eventually, the service provider had to switch it off.

Particularly slow pages included:

1. Home Page

2. Applications settings page

The ISP has said that it generates an "unusually large number" of requests on the CPU. This was sufficient that with only a dozen or so users on the forum to bring down the server. THis has been tried on two different ISPs.

Thanks.

Comments

  • DarthGrozniiDarthGroznii
    More detailed information:

    The site holds approximately 18,200 discussions.
    892 users.
    Until recently, IP addresses were logged.
    136198 Unique Guests

    The following extensions are enabled:

    ParticipatedThreads

    BetterBBCode

    BBInsertBar

    comments_permalinks

    DiscussionTags

    LatestPostsIntegration

    Smile

    GuestWelcome

    DiscussionPages

    NewApplicants

    PanelLists

    Poll

    AjaxQuote

    DiscussionCounters

    RSS2

    CategoryJumper

    PrivateMessages

    UserTasks

    WhosOnline

    Blog

    DuplicateEmailCheck

    Statistics

    HtmlFormatter

    PreviewPost

    SpellChecker

    MemberGoogleMap

    PageMng

    ReportPost

    CommentRemoval

    LowCalVanilla

    Nugget

    Thank you.
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    You may want to look into SimpleCache. This extension saves the page to disk and will serve the disk copy on subsequent requests for a time, drastically reducing load to MySQL.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    I'd also suggest removing extensions such as Statistics and Who's Online. If you moved to using a caching extension these would be reasonably useless anyway. I really cant see any reason whatsoever why the app settings page would be slow to load as pretty much all the information (if not all of it?) comes from flat files... To be honest with a forum of that size, depending how active it is (18k discussions over how long?) I'd consider moving to either a virtual dedicated server or a physical dedicated server. This site (along with a few other of Mark's sites and projects - I'm not sure how many there are) run on a physical dedicated box and as you can see it performs fine and is pretty active. Obviously this isnt a cheap option but if you're running a forum of that size presumably there's a pretty solid use for it?
  • GrahackGrahack
    edited November 2007
    If lots of guests read your forum, SimpleCache will be very efficient since it stores one file (for every request) for all the guests (is my sentence clear?).
    Not sure but caching (almost) every page for guest for only one minute could be great.

    @mini: you say "Stats and Who's Online would be reasonably useless" if using a cache extension, could you detail please?
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Well it depends what the cache settings were. I was just thinking that if you cached the page for, say, 10 minutes (i realise that's a lot), the data would soon be pretty out of date in which case they may aswell be turned off. As an aside, I think both of these extensions have some kind of caching built in anyway to reduce DB load.
This discussion has been closed.