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-- Is it just me, or does this forum stall a lot?


Posted by cryophonik on Aug-04-2009 17:58:

Question Is it just me, or does this forum stall a lot?

Lately it seems like the forum stalls a lot for me. Sometimes, I'll click a thread and it will take anywhere from like 30 seconds to several minutes before it opens. It does it on my work computer and my home computers, so I don't think it's on my end.

Anybody else experiencing this?


Posted by owien on Aug-04-2009 18:00:

yep this does often happen for a bit then sorts it self out again


Posted by [Alpha]Dave on Aug-04-2009 18:04:

It happens to me too, quite often! So you're not alone..


Posted by cl0ckw3rk on Aug-04-2009 18:07:

+1 on that


Posted by sixofour.604 on Aug-04-2009 18:08:

That's not all, yesterday I posted a thread while it stalled, when I came back my post was posted like 27 times. o0 So something is rather buggy, i tyhink the forum software is from like 1999 lol.


Posted by MSZ on Aug-04-2009 18:10:

lets get a refund... oh wait. tons of users on this board, lets be thankful


Posted by cryophonik on Aug-04-2009 19:17:

OK, so it's not just me - that's good to know.

quote:
Originally posted by sixofour.604
That's not all, yesterday I posted a thread while it stalled, when I came back my post was posted like 27 times...


Now, that's weird!


Posted by alanzo on Aug-04-2009 20:12:

It's been doing that ever since I was a member.. so almost 7 years now. I guess they've been on the same shitty server since then and haven't upgraded AT ALL. Dumb problems like the server timing out, and then working immediately after, are quite 90s.

Pretty annoying. I typically will just give it a re-load if it doesn't send anything back after 10 seconds.


Posted by alanzo on Aug-04-2009 20:12:

quote:
Originally posted by sixofour.604
That's not all, yesterday I posted a thread while it stalled, when I came back my post was posted like 27 times. o0 So something is rather buggy, i tyhink the forum software is from like 1999 lol.


You probably hit the button 27 times. It's not the software, it's the server.


Posted by DigiNut on Aug-04-2009 23:05:

Damn skippy. TA has always been like that though. It tends to go hand-in-hand with 10-year-old software.


Posted by alanzo on Aug-05-2009 00:01:

quote:
Originally posted by DigiNut
Damn skippy. TA has always been like that though. It tends to go hand-in-hand with 10-year-old software.


Damnit, it's not the fucking software. There is NOTHING WRONG with this PHP forum script. It just runs an old and ugly template, no big deal. It's the server. The timeout behavior has been around for at least as long as I have. It's something to complain to Swamper about. But if he hasn't done anything about it by now, I doubt he ever will.


Posted by cryophonik on Aug-05-2009 00:09:

Yeah, I know it's been a slow for a long time, but it seems like it's gotten a lot worse over the past few weeks (at least for me). I don't recall ever having to wait 1-2 minutes for one of my threads to post until just recently.


Posted by DigiNut on Aug-05-2009 00:50:

quote:
Originally posted by alanzo
Damnit, it's not the fucking software. There is NOTHING WRONG with this PHP forum script.

It's not buggy as hell like Community Server, if that's what you mean, but there are definitely throughput issues with running an old app and database that wasn't designed to handle this many users. I think that Del keeps the hardware reasonably up-to-date, which definitely helps, but I know first-hand about a lot of the inefficiencies in this system.

You mention "timeout behaviour", but timeouts are the solution (or rather a somewhat clumsy workaround), not part of the problem. A timeout only happens when there's a deadlock or when a script runs for too long. Aside from minor network hiccups, which clearly isn't the issue here, what else do you think could be causing it to run slow? It's high load on a system that doesn't scale so well to that kind of load.


Posted by alanzo on Aug-05-2009 15:43:

quote:
Originally posted by DigiNut
It's not buggy as hell like Community Server, if that's what you mean, but there are definitely throughput issues with running an old app and database that wasn't designed to handle this many users. I think that Del keeps the hardware reasonably up-to-date, which definitely helps, but I know first-hand about a lot of the inefficiencies in this system.

You mention "timeout behaviour", but timeouts are the solution (or rather a somewhat clumsy workaround), not part of the problem. A timeout only happens when there's a deadlock or when a script runs for too long. Aside from minor network hiccups, which clearly isn't the issue here, what else do you think could be causing it to run slow? It's high load on a system that doesn't scale so well to that kind of load.


Oh, by "software" I thought you meant the PHP script, not the software the server is running. It could be the software the server is running. I generalized it by stating that the server sucks.


Posted by david.michael on Aug-05-2009 15:48:

Also, TA's database has to be freaking immense by now.


Posted by DigiNut on Aug-06-2009 00:25:

quote:
Originally posted by alanzo
Oh, by "software" I thought you meant the PHP script, not the software the server is running. It could be the software the server is running. I generalized it by stating that the server sucks.

The PHP script is part of it. It's not so much that the script is slow - as far as I know there aren't any horribly clunky algorithms in there - it's just that once a site reaches a certain size, certain optimizations have to be made in order to maintain quality of service, and vB doesn't have those (although I believe Swamper has made a few tweaks here and there).

The bigger problem is probably the database, which as david points out must be immense now, and almost certainly wasn't designed to grow to that size. As a rule of thumb, every order of magnitude increase in the database size necessitates major design changes; so what hums along nicely for 100 users will be sluggish for 1000 users, and once it's updated to support 1000 users it will have trouble with 10,000, and the next iteration will almost certainly be creaking under the weight of 100,000 users, which is close to where we're at now. Throwing more hardware at it tends to only give you a linear increase in capacity, compared to the exponentially-increasing requirements.

I think TA has some sort of mirroring set up, and it works most of the time, but obviously sometimes it isn't enough. The whole vB "package" just isn't designed to support that kind of volume. At peak periods, especially when the online user count is up near 1000 or higher, it chugs.


Posted by sixofour.604 on Aug-06-2009 01:14:

Sounds like its time to grandfather users/threads 6 or more months old? Put them in an archive somewhere.


Posted by Cryogen on Aug-06-2009 09:29:

It just stalled opening this thread

vB is really capable software too. In it's current form anyway, the package on here seem quite old. Some of the largest forums on the net run on vB. Off Topic for instance. 208k users and 119m posts but it feels really fast.

Then again, check out the back end ...

Hardware config Web Server: Dual Opteron 246, 8 Gigs of Ram ,Quantum Atlas IV 10k 36 Gig Raid 1 with Adaptec Ultra 160 Raid Card, Dual Gigabit Ethernet Database Server: P4 2.8E w/1MB cache, 2 Gigs of Ram, Intel CSA Gigabit Interface ,Quantum Atlas IV 10k 36k Raid 1 with Adaptec Ultra 160 Raid Card Future Hardware that has already been purchased and will be installed in a month (june 2004): Cisco 11503 Content Switch with 18 ports, GBIC, Dell Powerconnect 24 Port Gigabit Switch, APC 5000VA Web Servers - 3 of them: Dell Poweredge 1750, Dual 2.4 Xeon, 2 gigs of Ram, Dual Broadcom Gigabit Interface, LSI Ultra 320 SCSI, Seagate Cheetah 15k Drive. Gallery/Uploads Server: Dell Poweredge 1750, 2.4 Xeon, 1 gig of Ram, Dual Broadcom Gigabit Interface, LSI Ultra 320 SCSI, Seagate Cheetah 15k Drive. Database Server: Dell Poweredge 1750, Dual 3.06 Xeons, 4 gigs of Ram, Dual Broadcom Gigabit Interface, LSI Ultra 320 Raid Controller, 2 Fujitsu 15k Drives - Raid 1.



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