Is CP Slower...

[teamchachi]

For those who are interested: We currently have a sweetheart deal on colocation for the server. Unfortunately, it doesn't include a ton of bandwidth (1.5 megabits capped). We occasionally fill the pipe during peak usage periods which results in slowness when browsing.

Photon and I are working towards offloading all of the static content (images, CSS, javascript, etc.) to other servers (a content distribution network) in order to allow the main server to just serve the php generated forum html. This should allow us to double the number of concurrent users before slowness occurs due to network congestion.

[photon]

Yup, I'm actually upgrading our forum software to the latest version which will require some template updates, and when that's complete I'll start the process of moving the content over to the other servers.

[HOOT]

I don't like change it freaks me out!

Great work everyone!

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by teamchachi

For those who are interested: We currently have a sweetheart deal on colocation for the server. Unfortunately, it doesn't include a ton of bandwidth (1.5 megabits capped). We occasionally fill the pipe during peak usage periods which results in slowness when browsing.

Photon and I are working towards offloading all of the static content (images, CSS, javascript, etc.) to other servers (a content distribution network) in order to allow the main server to just serve the php generated forum html. This should allow us to double the number of concurrent users before slowness occurs due to network congestion.

Thanks, I'm always curious how the backend works.

Can you pass on any DB statistics? I'm assuming it is MySQL. (I'm an Oracle dba, so I'm curious about your table sizes, schemas, etc.)

[teamchachi]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

Thanks, I'm always curious how the backend works.

Can you pass on any DB statistics? I'm assuming it is MySQL. (I'm an Oracle dba, so I'm curious about your table sizes, schemas, etc.)

Yes, it is MySQL. You'll need to hassle Photon for details on the db details.

I can tell you that we've been successful in offloading most of the static content which has dropped our bandwidth usage by about 30%. We've also implemented some aggressive caching policies to make sure that your browser caches as much javascript, css, and image content as possible. Bandwidth savings should continue to improve as more CPers cache the static content.

The goal is to have the server only serve PHP generated HTML, with everything else being served by our content distribution network servers. Filling the pipe with avatars is not the most efficient use of our bandwidth!

The end result should be faster page loads (content loads much faster from your browser cache) and a server that is much more responsive under load. Apache is definitely doing a LOT less work than it was at this time last week.

It will take some *serious* concurrent page requests (~15-20 pages per second) before we fill the pipe again...

[photon]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

Thanks, I'm always curious how the backend works.

Can you pass on any DB statistics? I'm assuming it is MySQL. (I'm an Oracle dba, so I'm curious about your table sizes, schemas, etc.)

Sure, the schema is done by vbulletin so we don't have any control.. There's 169 tables, 20 of them are for the flashchat program, the rest for vb. As you can imagine most of the tables are really small, except for the post table which has 1.5 million records and is over 1.1GB. The rest of the database is 100MB or less, and there's 2.4 million records total.

All the tables are MyISAM except for a couple of memory tables, which is interesting since MyISAM only supports table locking if I recall. Still the query cache gets good use and the mysql load on the server is pretty steady but not extreme; we're not limited by mysql at this point.

I've done some reading about guys with really huge forums that have rewritten quite a few of the queries in vb as well as made some tables innodb as they ran into a bit bottleneck with locking.

Now that you mention it I'm taking a look at the database stats and while they're good, they could be better. It looks like there are some tables that could use some indexes, and my query cache is probably too small.

Hm... server's been up for 14 days (did some updates that needed a reboot), averaging 26 queries per second.

[Bobblehead]

Cool. I'm always impressed about how a busy board can get such solid response times. I need to play with MySQL a bit more, but there are a lot of things I'd like to find a fun project to play with new tools, be it MySql, .NET, anything!