IPB 3.4.4 optimization problems?

[wimg]

I run a fairly large board, 2.6 million posts, > 300,000 unique visits per month, 10 GB or more bandwidth usage per day, up to 5000 users per hour so far, occasionally crazy amounts of spam bots too.

We upgraded from 3.1.4 to 3.4.4 recently, and Invision helped us with that, fortunately.

We seem to have a bit of a problem with performance now, however, whereas it was mostly ok before. Especially writing to the database appears to be incredibly slow. I tuned the performance of the board myself for 3.0.x and 3.1.x to good effect, and it served us well. The same settings do not help with IPB 3.4.4 however.

I made a few changes, and initial loads seem to be faster, but saving a post makes the time indicator just go and go and never stop. When you back out of it two steps, before you started editing a post, and then refresh, it is quite fine, however, and the post is saved as well.

Going to the last post in a topic, especially if it is longer than a page, gives the same problem.

Did anybody here experience the same thing before and managed to fix it, and how in that case, or does anybody have a clue as to what might be happening?

It is browser independent, as far as I can see.

Note that it doesn't happen how many users are aboard, 2 or 3 or 1500, in the latter case it just seems to get a lot worse.

Thank you in advance for any assistance with this!

Warm regards, Wim

[Luis Manson]

what did you already did?

how is your SQL? any slow querys?

[wimg]

We have tried everything. It is just happening when clicking straight on the last post option in any topic with more than one page, and when posting messages.

Any display of the first page of a topic is fine. Moving from one page to the next is fine. And we have played with all options of add-ons turned on and off, currently everything of with a minimal board - makes no difference. Retuning parameters for Apache and MySQL appears to make no difference. High load or extremely low load - makes no difference. We've tried all the permutations, well, very many.

I've put our server hosting team on it as well, and they are looking into it too. We never had this problem with 3.1.4. It worked as slow or fast everywhere the same, depending on load only.

Currently, in 3.4.4., it appears not to progress further, but kinda hiccups. The busy icon stops, and starts, stops and starts, all the time, and it isn't the browser either, I have tried 5 different ones.

I find this really strange - over here, on the Invision board everything appears to be working fine. I am pulling my hair out at the moment, well, the little I have left.

I have just switched on a log for slow queries - we'll have to see. The board is offline currently.

Warm regards, Wim

P.S.: no slow queries so far. Weird. I've created a ticket for it.

[wimg]

It appears it is member account related - some experience this, others don't.

Currently rebuilding the topics and members. We'll have to see thereafter (slow process with 2.6 million posts and 75K members).

Warm regards, Wim

[wimg]

Update: after the rebuild was done the problem was still there.

However, while doing this rebuild there was plenty of time to look at every file belonging to the Invision software and comparing it with the official distro.

Result: 3 differences, one of which a configuration .xml file. Overwriting that with the file from the distro fixed this.

A big thumbs-up to Invision for helping me fix this!

Warm regards, Wim

[B-Jiggy]

Where do you find this .xml file?

[Rod.]

I'm having the same issue, my site is suddenly extremely slow. Can someone please help?

[wimg]

I'm having the same issue, my site is suddenly extremely slow. Can someone please help?

Where do you find this .xml file?

from dl-ed package: admin/applications/core/xml/core_settings.xml 182 KBytes 15-04-2013
installed on board: admin/applications/core/xml/core_settings.xml 185 KBytes 08-04-2013

Overwriting the one on the board with the one from the distro package fixed that particular problem.

Something else may be plaguing you too, but do try this first.

HTH, kindest regards, Wim

[Rod.]

Thanks for the info. Just tried that, and it's not making a difference.

[wimg]

When did this happen, and what is exactly happening?

High CPU and memory usage, or something else?

Kind regards, Wim

[Rod.]

Started a month or so ago, and has gotten worse. It was so bad today, the server kept crashing, I even had to repair my db as it crashed.

I seem to have pinpointed the issue to the status update feature. I have disabled that, and the issue has gone away. This must be a bug in 3.4.2.

[wimg]

That's very good to hear, Rod, that you found the cause that is.

We haven't enabled the status update feature, so I have no idea whether there are similar problems with it on 3.4.4.

Kind regards, Wim

[B-Jiggy]

Does IPS have any plans to address this issue in a 3.4.5 update?

[Planetby]

Started a month or so ago, and has gotten worse. It was so bad today, the server kept crashing, I even had to repair my db as it crashed.

I seem to have pinpointed the issue to the status update feature. I have disabled that, and the issue has gone away. This must be a bug in 3.4.2.

How did you disable it ?

My sites been slow as mud for a while now and I am having the same problems with random crashes etc

[MGBrose]

Started a month or so ago, and has gotten worse. It was so bad today, the server kept crashing, I even had to repair my db as it crashed.

I seem to have pinpointed the issue to the status update feature. I have disabled that, and the issue has gone away. This must be a bug in 3.4.2.

A number of boards after enabling IPSEO report slow posting times, greater than 60 seconds sometimes. To fix this disable ALL PING SERVICES from ipbseo modules.

Also check your errors, SMTP connection errors can cause hang on posting.

Status Updates might be a different monster though, so i'm not familiar with that issue.

Both of these symptoms are MARJOR, and should be fixed by IPS. Try disabling your ping services(delete them all), I bet that'll fix things for you. Plus when your site is as big as yours google is crawling you all day all night, so no need for ping services.

[wimg]

Thank you, MGBrose.

I immediately checked IPSEO. It already was disabled on our board, but I also deleted the links.

I'll check if there is a difference in performance over the next few days.

Warm regards, Wim