Capacity

[DieselBuzz]

Dear TDR Staff,

Recently I have tried to navigate the site and was rejected with a notice saying that the server was too busy. If there is anyway that you can increase you capacity in the future I would be grateful. Thanks for a great site.

Art

 

[chuck3]

Art I get that once in a while myself but it usually only last a couple of minutes, so next time just keep trying and you will get on. chuck.

 

[Doc Tinker]

admin said to wait awhile before trying again. If you keep trying, right away, you might be guilty of hammering the site which constipates it even more.



Doc

 

[chuck3]

Hey thanks Doc I sure don't want to constipate anyone.

 

[DieselBuzz]

I certainly don't want to be accused of plugging up the site.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Power Wagon]

Just to be clear... I am NOT intimately aquainted with all the hardware and software used here... But TDR's site has been upgraded and tweaked quite a few times already. I would suspect that doing so again would be quite a large investment. For the very few times when the peaks seem to exceed capacity for a few minutes or moments, I would suggest they not actually change anything.



ISP's have this problem too... for about 2 hours a day, usage rises to roughly 5 to 8 times average. The rest of the time, and especially during the early morning, ISP's have a massive investment sitting around idle. Building this site to manage the occaisional massiv spike would be pretty stiff monetarily.



Not providing excuses, just commenting on the nature of the beast.

 

[illflem]

I read somewhere that performing a search ties up a server much more than regular usage, is this true?

 

[admin2]

In response to Power Wagon...

Power Wagon is correct.



Right now, the server is near the peak for standard rack mount PC hardware. Throwing more hardware at it could potentially increase the speed but the performance return gets smaller and smaller for each dollar spent on hardware.



The wall being hit at this point is the MySQL server software, not the hardward. While we can tune and tweak MySQL, we are still fundamentally bound by it.



In July, when everyone asked for us to decrease the minimum word size for searching, I noted the searches could eventually cause a problem as the database got larger. We're starting to see that occur and the photo gallery, which uses the database, caused it to happen a little sooner because it effectively added about 40% to the number of queries to the database (they are pretty low intensity queries, but queries none the less).



I tweaked the photo gallery software to use the database less and did some tuning on the database and added some indexes that but its a short term solution. Long term is to move to the Postgres database (which for smaller loads is slower than Mysql but faster for higher loads). Right now, VBulletin doesn't support Postgres, though they've said they plan to support it sometime soon...

 

[Joe G.]

Does Postgres support quoted string searches?

 

[admin2]

Quoted strings...

That's the function of VBulletin rather than the underlying database. I don't know if its on the plate for VB 3. 0, but I can find out if you wish... .

 

[Joe G.]

Thanks, I would appreciate that.

 

[Doc Tinker]

With the amount of repeat questions that seem to hit the technical forums, I would guess that most of the new guys don't understand the search options that are available. Seeing as we continue to go over some of the same stuff anyway, maybe you should limit the searchable archives to six months. That should ease some of the burden caused by the searches.



Doc

 

[admin2]

More tuning...

I've tweaked the database settings this evening, giving the database more system RAM. It should give even more speed -- if it impacts anything else on the system (ie, we start hitting the swap file, something we avoid) we'll see about throwing in an extra gigabyte of RAM.



System went down momentarily (about 2 minutes) this evening for reboot... not a biggie... Any significant downtime will announced if we have to schedule it (I doubt it).



But I must admit, the chat server was down for a while. Its up now.

 

[Doc Tinker]

There were over 190 on last night, for a while. The board was still clipping along pretty good for me.



Doc

 

[DieselBuzz]

Thanks Admin for the tweaking. It's just nice to know or have it communicated to us that you are attending to the site. Otherwise we are left to guess, when that happens it seems that you don't get the credit and thanks you deserve.

Doc, I agree in part to your seach idea. I could see the search limited to a six month stretch at each search. This could cut down on the time and resources used while still providing access to older threads. Just my twist on your idea.

Art



P. S. Doc that is the most original and humorus avatar on the whole site!

 

[admin2]

Think we isolated the problem....

After some searching on the VBulletin support boards it seems that the #1 offender is the post view counter. Since it is not a critical function, it might go away for a couple of months until VBulletin 3 is released... .