Regarding Forum Lag

Belazor et Britannia

Belazor et Britannia

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As I'm sure everyone who frequents this forum has noticed, this forum has a tendency to hang on page loading for a significant portion of time (~30 seconds) before displaying the page.

This has been reported (and confirmed by myself) to happen globally on the forum, even while posting or shouting in the Shoutbox.

Personally I believe this to be due to vBulletin 3.8.x not coping very well with a large forum, due to the fact that the slowness does not appear to be happening on any of the other sites running on this server (all running vB4), however others believe it may be related to the modifications installed on the forum.

Being the developer of the majority of the modifications, it's in my best interest to ensure the mods are scalable even for large sites.

Therefore I'm going to begin a process of disabling modifications and selectively re-enabling them until I find the culprit(s), if any.

The modifications that will be disabled in Round 1 are as follows:

  • User Tagging (the @ feature)
  • Forumon RPG
  • Triple Triad
  • vBActivity (accumulating points will not be possible during this time)
If the forum is still exhibiting the same symptoms, the following modifications will be disabled (Round 2):

  • vBShout (the Shoutbox)
  • InfoPanels (the Welcome Panel and Top X Stats blocks)
  • vBShop (Social Groups will be inaccessible during this time)
If even with those 7 modifications disabled the forum is still running slow, I will re-enable the modifications and look into alternative solutions.

However, should one of those modifications prove to be the culprit, it will for all intents and purposes remain disabled (severely reduced functionality mode) until I can identify the exact problematic area and fix it.

Please do not post Helpdesk threads regarding broken display or functionality, as we will already be well aware of it :)


Thank you for your patience and understanding during this "trial" period.
 
I doubt that mod's related to the lag, as it doesn't do any computing / display outside of its own pages. I just disabled it for the sake of it not poisoning the test results, pretty much :P
 
Why has it happened now may I ask? It seemed to be running fine for a while with all of these mods, and the long loads came about suddenly. Or was it just always at bursting point and it was only a matter of time till something gave?
 
That's part of what I'm hoping to find out xD
 
I see, good luck then I guess

Though might I suggest setting the SB by itself in a third round of checks, it would be a pain to have it down for even a short while. That way if you find the culprit before the third round we will not have to lose it. Then again this is assuming the checks take a few days per round and not say a few minutes
 
I'm happy with whatever is disabled as long as the lag goes away :ryan: Easier to communicate in the codbox where there is less lag :awesome:
 
I doubt it's going to take days, as the lag usually appeared within 15 minutes of browsing around.

No word on when it's all said and done yet though :)
 
Hooray :reptar: If any of those plugins have been updated recently, that could help narrow down which one might be causing lag. Not questioning your knowledge, Belazor, just trying to be helpful :)
 
I've found the source of the problem, and it is not related to any of the plugins above.

The issue is that the forum's language (pretty much all the text you see) is ran off the database, and intermittently this takes a very long time to fetch from the database.

There's no known workaround or fix at this time.


All mods have been turned back on and restored to full functionality.
 
Well the lag stopped when you removed vBactivity :hmmm: Or maybe that was just a coincidence? And why wasn't this causing lag before? 8( This is confusing.
 
It was a coincidence as far as I could tell, as I was able to reproduce the slow query even when running it manually (separate from vBulletin).
 
So because there's a lot of text it has to fetch, it loads slow? How would this be any different from a few weeks/months ago aside from there being more posts? :hmmm: Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
 
Yeah... that really doesn't add up? :hmmm: but he is the professional here. he knows more about this stuff then us :lew:


maybe we could delete some of it? :hmmm:
 
Backup the Zanarkand Ruins elsewhere and prune them?
 
It's not forums. It's the language. You know how you see words all over the forum like "Quick Reply" etc?

They are all translatable via the use of a "Phrase" system, which has grown to about 1.3k words on the forum home page. That is what's causing the delay.

I'm not sure if it's possible to cache them in some other way, though...
 
Thank you for trying to fix the forum. It is very much appreciated.
 
Upon further investigation, it turned out that my previous assessment was incorrect. I was able to observe what caused the issue via a page in phpMyAdmin, and it turned out it was vBActivity's "Activity Feed" that caused the database to lock itself from processing any other requests while it was writing the result data to the file system.

In other words, whenever someone visited that page, the server would need to wait for ~30 seconds before doing anything else (such as shoutbox shouts, posts, etc).

I am currently working on a setting to turn off the offending page. For the moment, I have removed the file powering that page to avoid people spam-refreshing that page in an attempt to lock up the server.

I'll continue to monitor the server's performance throughout the day, in case there's other areas that suffer similar issues :)
 
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