I wont dribble on. I get lots of major spikes from the topic marker tables. They are small but I discovered highly fragmented in a short amount of time. I added a cronjob to optimize them every half hour. Since then -- goodness.

OPTIMIZE TABLE `ibf_core_item_markers`;
OPTIMIZE TABLE `ibf_core_item_markers_storage`;

Make a cronjob to run this every 30 minutes. It is very fast and has prevented spikes so far on my server. Food for thought! I was getting 50 or more loads for brief times and not any so far. maybe just luck but I am hoping the final fix!

@all

As a follow up. Charles has confirmed that this is something that is "known" about. I suggest those having issues try this above. It has worked wonders for me, where nothing else did. Charles indicated this will be a feature in 3.1 (optimize automatically). Until then I suggest the above to help reduce spikes in load that at least for me, were very bad!

Thanks Fast Lane, how do I set up this up in cPanel? Any help appreciated.

create a file called "db_optimize" with the following contents:

OPTIMIZE TABLE `ibf_core_item_markers_storage`;
OPTIMIZE TABLE `ibf_core_item_markers`;

then set a crontab as follows:

30 * * * * mysql -u"data base username" -p"data base password" "data base name" < db_optimize

enter the above items in " "'s without the quotes so for example if your username to your database is Tom then do ... "30 * * * * mysql -uTom ...", :).

the "< db_optimize" part of the cron points to the file. If the file is not in your users root directory you will need to point to it, ex: "/home/user/db_optimize".

Thanks for your reply. I'll give that a try.

Nice find, after those tables are optimized forum fly's, it's like 10x faster than normal.

Time to load index page goes down from 0.9 to 0.6s.

Awesome news! Mine has been TONS faster since I have this cron running. I hope IPB can circulate this news. I will cross post to get some eyes on it. Hopefully many people will not have to go through the same trouble / slow downs.

could this be done via a board task
similar to the clean up mysql process one ?

Sure. I prefer the regularity of the crontab but either way would work :).

we completely disable markers, load still spike