[MCaver]

Looking at the stats for the database server we moved to, it's worse than the one we moved from. So, I'm planning another database server move, probably for Thursday night (10pm?). I'll know fore sure closer to then. The migration should go a lot faster this time, since I've now automated the process. I've been watching several database servers so I can pick the best, and hopefully avoid this situaton from happening again. Until then, please bear with us.

[Justan]

How much web bandwidth does the server get? What's the speed of the connection on the server's side?

[Tom]

MCaver has the bandwith stats, but bandwidth is not the issue here, nor is connection speed. Basically all our forum data is stored in a database. The database resides on a database server provided by our host. It is a shared server meaning other users also store data on this database server and run similar queries. These are generally "fast" servers with the capacity to handle a lot of requests. When someone else on the database server is an ignoramus and runs a "large" query it slows down our queries, meaning they get stacked up in the queue. If more than 20 of our requests get stacked up the database server basically shuts us off, even though it was another idiot on the server causing our queries to get stacked up and not complete in a timely fashion. So basically we are looking for a database server that doesn't have idiots on it because our host seems incapable of monitoring this and/or booting the offenders (quite surprising given who our host is, pair.com).

[MCaver]

[Justan]

Thanks for takin’ the time to ‘splain. From here you can’t tell if the problem is the server speed or the web interface or just something hinkey at the OS/AP interface. Does the server use any kind of QOS rules? What would be the cost be for a dedicated box? Your description makes it sound like the server is woefully short of ram and maybe even processing speed, with the end result of not enough throughput to handle the transactions. I mean both from NWH.net and whatever other stuff is run from the box. In the end the processor/ram/drive relationship is too pokey for the tasks it has to chew. I’d contribute for a box. I bet others would too... here it is mid morning and over 30 users Tom’s post came after I wrote the stuff above: Are you saying the bottle neck is a user cap on the app software? I own a license for vBulletin if you’re interested. It was for a project I started but let crawl away.....

[MCaver]

The user cap is on the shared MySQL database our provider has set up. The database server as a whole has a user cap of 200, but each user has a max cap of 20 per user. That's what's slowing us down, I believe, at least when another user on the server is slowing the whole thing down and causing us to hit our max. The cost of running on a dedicated server at our existing provider is very prohibitive -- approximately 10x the cost we're paying now. As I said to marylou in another thread, I don't think we're to the point of needing a dedicated server, we just need to get off a bad database server. We may get there eventually, at which point we'll start asking for donations, but the overhead involved in that is more than I (and I think Tom as well) want to deal with right now. I'm donating the space, and as long as we can keep the site running on our existing account, I'm happy to. If we ever do need to move, we'll probably have to go the donation route. I don't think that time is now.

[Tom]

As far as number of users vs. database connections, we can handle a lot more than 20 users on the board at the same time, easily 4-5x that number. We'd only have a problem running out of connections if all the users simultaneously requested info at the exact same time. When we run out of connections it is due to a query taking a minute or more to complete. This is not due to our software, it is due to someone else on the server doing something that stacks up our queries for this long. The queries that I can see getting "stuck" normally run in less than a second. The software we use is very capable and not really less efficient than vBulletin. It just doesn't cost anything and is highly customizable.

[Justan]

Thanks again for the details. Still it sounds like something isn’t quite right. The user counts are all pretty modest and unless someone is running endless huge sorts or sums on the databases you shouldn’t even be able to see hardly a pause. FWIW, I had a case recently where a defective router was pushing a lot of ARP traffic that sucked the legs out of a network. It took a while to find and then pin down but it made a huge performance gain once the flaky hardware was gone. Not saying that ARP data is the issue here, just food for thought.... For the sake clarification I made the offer for vBulletin because I though the sw you were using had a user cap. I dunno enough about the differences between forum software types to make a useful observation about suitability, beyond the user cap I mistakenly thought you were saying. Thanks also for the great site! Quite a nice friendly group!!

[MCaver]

No problem. Thanks for trying to help.

[MCaver]

Reminder: we're changing database servers at 10pm. The site will be unavailable for a short period of time.

[MCaver]

Ok, we're up on the new database server. Hopefully this one will be better than the last. Just a note, there seems to be some serious slowness going on right now, and it's across all database servers at my web host, not just the new one. That's why it took so long to make the switch. Hopefully they'll get this addressed and we can see how good the new server really is.

[MCaver]

It looks like Pair restarted our web server overnight and things are blazing along quite nicely now. Hopefully, we're good to go for a while now.

[borank]

*Thread drift warning*

[Tom]

MCaver did some research on all the available database servers and picked one that was free of "slow" queries showing up in the logs, i.e. no idiots on it. So far it seems to have done the trick.

[MCaver]

This is of course assuming we aren't the ones causing the slow queries (i.e. The Idiots). Results are still out... Edit: Actually, we've been on this new server for over 12 hours and still no slow queries. By comparison, our previous server was recording >50 slow queries per hour. I think I can safely say the idiot wasn't us.