2013 Site Performance and Problems

[bikehikeskifish]

Use this thread for reporting problems, performance feedback, etc. We are on a free trial VPS plan through 2/6/2013. I would give it a few days before weighing in on performance. I have a "magic lever" which allows me to change the max memory for the VPS (we pay per MB of memory with the VPS solution.)

I am interested in:

- consistency of response times
- performance of popular queries (activity stream, new posts, new thread, reply)
- performance of searches

We are still using the shared MySQL server.


Tim

 

[Tom Rankin]

What are the peak hours of usage?

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Peak hours typically are around lunch time and 6-10PM, east coast time. There have been numerous instances where it took 20-30 seconds (or more) for a single operation. I suspect those are on the database server which will not improve unless I VPS that as well...

Tim

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Bump... What do people think? Personally, as I suspected up-front, the performance snags are all in the database server. I can trial that on a VPS as well.

ETA - We have barely scraped the ceiling of the "minimum" VPS configuration (300MB) for the web server, and the load average is consistently below 0.5 - in my experience the web server is doing virtually nothing at all, which strongly suggests the bottlenecks are at the shared database server.

Tim

 

[peakbagger]

It does seem to stall less but advanced search is still slow to respond.

 

[Kevin Rooney]

Personally, I wouldn't knock yourself out unless you've got nothing better to do. It's about like everything else on the 'net - press the button, wait a few seonds, then Voila! There are bottlenecks in the network itself which often offset any performance gains on the app side.

 

[bikehikeskifish]

VFTT is nowhere near as fast as other vBulletin sites - sites I know that are paying more, for sure, for VPS or dedicated hardware. At the moment, I remain unsatisfied with performance, and I do not see any real difference in performance. There is a security benefit to having the web server not be shared, however. There have been some complaints in the past, which we agreed to address when the hosting contract renews - which is next week.

Tim

 

[RollingRock]

Personally, I wouldn't knock yourself out unless you've got nothing better to do. It's about like everything else on the 'net - press the button, wait a few seonds, then Voila! There are bottlenecks in the network itself which often offset any performance gains on the app side.

Tim, I would agree with Kevin's assessment. I haven't noticed much difference from before. Thanks for all you do!

 

[Daniel Eagan]

In my experience performance has been in line with other vBulletin sites I subscribe to, perhaps a little slower at peak times. I attribute any slowdowns to my wretched Verizon service.

By the way, is it time for annual contributions?

 

[bikehikeskifish]

We are all set on donations for a while. If you want to make one, I won't tell you not to, but we have plenty of runway. I will not be shy when that runway gets short, OK?

Thanks for offering,
Tim