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draude
Administrator
Joined: 10 Dec 2002
Posts: 356
Location: San Francisco
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 Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 3:14 pm Post subject: Site performance issues |
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For some time now, there have been quite a few reports of bad site performance. These reports were always somewhat sporadic as far as timing but generally, they were accurate.
I've been analyzing performance over the last couple of days (since the upgrade) and definitely found some problem areas. The biggest one was that some custom queries (not phpbb queries) were not scaling well. These were fine when the data set was small but now that the data set is quite large, they're too slow. This problem became compounded tenfold when you had concurrent visits by search engine crawlers, i.e. Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp.
To remedy this situation, I've removed or modified these problematic queries to ease load on the database. The net effect is minimal and most of you won't notice the difference. But this should definitely make performance smoother and remove some of those rough spots. The only real rough spot that is unavoidable is the one associated with the db backup which locks the database for the duration of the backup. But that one is predictable.
I believe things should be much smoother from here.
Thanks.
Ed |
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noranthon
Super User
Joined: 07 Jul 2005
Posts: 3318
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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This thread should lead you to some information about "full text searching" (that's the term I remember anyway). It's a feature of mySql version 5 which supposedly lightens the load on the server caused by searching (in phpBB also), a lot of which is presumably done by the numerous "guests". ('terrian' is a name I adopted in an attempt to persuade others that I am indeed from this planet; I subsequently discovered the term is used in relation to an alleged species of extraterrestrial beings. I don't know whether the term "Freudian slip" can apply to extraterrestrial references.)
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draude
Administrator
Joined: 10 Dec 2002
Posts: 356
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 7:15 pm Post subject: |
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| noranthon wrote: | | This thread should lead you to some information about "full text searching" (that's the term I remember anyway). |
Thanks. Yes, I'm familiar with mysql's full text search. I think it's been around since 4.0 or earlier. To be honest, I haven't looked at phpbb's search algorithm in detail. I agree it's not very good but I think it makes a pretty good tradeoff between functionality and performance. For more extensive searches, there's always Google.
At this point, I think guest searching has been less of a problem than some of the others I identified above. If the guest searching becomes problematic, it's really easy to limit searches to users only. Not sure how casual users would feel about that. Perhaps steering them toward Google (via a search box on the home page) makes the most sense. That coupled with making sure that Google indexes the entire site (which may not be the case as discussed in another thread).
| Quote: | | 'terrian' is a name I adopted in an attempt to persuade others that I am indeed from this planet; I subsequently discovered the term is used in relation to an alleged species of extraterrestrial beings. I don't know whether the term "Freudian slip" can apply to extraterrestrial references. |
LOL.
Ed |
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