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.

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

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.

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

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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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