Further Light and Knowledge

Today it was offline for at least seven hours (that I know of). Just FYI.

I'm sorry for all the downtime lately, folks. It's just getting worse, but I'm not going to have any free time to look at the problem until this weekend at the earliest. I think the database is just getting too large and is running out of memory, but I need to check a few things to make sure. I might need to upgrade the server, or "archive" some older posts and remove them from the database. I'll try and keep everyone posted. My apologies again for this crappiness.

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"You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen."
—Razumihin, Crime and Punishment

If a little downtime means that Sols posts for us more, I think it's a fair trade.

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Fear will keep the local systems in line.

Have you looked into managed hosting? You can get stuff like that for pretty cheap. Then you can let them worry about stability and redundancy.

Aside from that, I'm very technical and if you are running this on Linux, I can help out with keeping things stable. PM me and we can discuss it.

If you aren't running this on Linux, then you should be. There is a reason LAMP is dominant in the web world.

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Random Stuff from a Random Mind
Ex-Mormons Worldwide

I'm definitely running this on LAMP. And on a virtual private server to boot. I think the database has just grown too large and mysql is thrashing the disk. Managed hosting won't really help me on that front. (Other than the hosting provider telling me I'm too large and need to pay them more money or get off their server.)

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"You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen."
—Razumihin, Crime and Punishment

Sounds like you need a dedicated database server with an assload of RAM and get the thing off a virtual server and onto a real one.

The managed hosting would simply tell you pay them more money for the higher capacity. Of course, then you have to worry about monthly bandwidth, etc... You could also probably just host the MySQL db with managed hosting. What is the size of the DB? Could you perhaps archive anything over a year old to a separate location?

Some sites of interest:
http://www.siteground.com/mysql-hosting.htm
http://search.mysql.com/search?q=hosting&lr=lang_en
-of course-
http://www.rackspace.com (expensive)

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Random Stuff from a Random Mind
Ex-Mormons Worldwide

Another suggestion, Sols, is to maybe have a few of us that know how this shit works give you a hand with it ... I know this place takes up a lot of your time and life gets in the way. I know that there are several of us that are more than willing and able to help out in any way we can.

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"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison

It's more that it needs a serious RAM upgrade ... it can run just fine on a shared server.


That's my current thinking. The database is about 150mb, and phpBB is not particularly optimized for large forums. To display a forum index page, it does a complete table scan of all 15k topics (or however many there are). There are also some other queries I could optimize or add indexes for, but I think the better long-term solution is to just archive everything over a year old to static pages or the like.

The idea of separate mysql hosting is an intriguing idea, though. I'll have to take a closer look into that. I'm guessing none of them would be happy about hosting a phpBB database of the size of FLAK's, so it might end up being more expensive than their entry-level rates, but it's worth checking out at least. (You can check my post earlier in this thread to see FLAK's current financial status.)

to jbsaxman: that's definitely my long-term plan.

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"You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen."
—Razumihin, Crime and Punishment

An SSH login would do wonders...

I'm a terminal bigot so ssh is all I need, well, bash and vim too, but those are standard on linux anyway.

150MB database is peanuts, I thought it was up around 1-2GB... If I wasn't "borrowing" wifi, I'd offer to host the DB myself on my machine, it has more than enough horsepower:

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Random Stuff from a Random Mind
Ex-Mormons Worldwide

Haha, the problem isn't the horsepower alone, it's the horsepower plus the bandwidth. I've got a beefy computer at home too, but even on Comcast's better days it wouldn't be able to host FLAK with reasonable latencies. To get even half a gig of RAM in a proper hosting facility is dang expensive. I took a look at those links you provided and a few others as well, and I don't think any of those options are going to be cheaper than even doubling the size of my current server.

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"You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen."
—Razumihin, Crime and Punishment

Is it possible to cluster the DBs? I may be talking out my ass here, but if you could find 3 or more ppl to help host, that would split the bandwith and load. It'd add the additional cluster traffic between nodes, but with 3 ppl in the cluster, it'd save at least 1/2 the bandwidth...

If the problem is bandwidth, the RAM on the server won't be the limiting factor with a 150MB DB. I'm surprised comcast isn't already shaping traffic to your server to throttle the bandwidth. Comcast is a bunch of asshats with a local monopoly. I'm assuming you have a non-residential account, or they'd be shutting you down once they noticed the amount of traffic, since hosting a server is clearly against all residential contracts I've ever seen.

I'm good at throwing out ideas, feel free to keep shooting them down, maybe one will be golden...

Pardon the scattershot nature of this email...I blame the screwdrivers...

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Random Stuff from a Random Mind
Ex-Mormons Worldwide

Also, if there are financial implications to upgrades/improvements, we can just do a fund-raising drive (again). It's not a problem to pay some money here and there to keep the joint hopping.

Hi Sols.