WHY WHY WHY!!!!!! (Version 2)

Don't panic DH!
This is actually clean and serious!

Why,(why, why) actually is it that we all have problems getting on here at times?

I think that is painfully obvious to everyone that it happens, but I never have understood why it does, or if there is anything that can be done to fix the problem.
It has been an issue on here for ages and ages really, and it gets me depressed (while waiting to view the new boobies thread posts and such)

I did a quick search and found well, not much really, it seems that when the question has come up before it just die away into nothing-ness.....

{Please feel free to move this to somewhere more appropriate, but not your recycle bin!}


Moved this to FB Help as it would be the place any members might go to look for an answer to this kind of question, and also more likely to get a response from our gracious host there

Gotta be too many users, servers not upto the numbers viewing the site.

That's what my computer often tells me too!
If there are too many people trying to get access to the forums, I think there ought to be some filtering system that gives priority to members before guests, or 'peepers'

Toby is the only one who can answer this in any detail really, but a detailed explanation in layman’s terms would takes ages! Incidentally, the 'too many users' error refers to too many connections to the database at a given time.


As far as I can remember Toby was recently looking at outsourcing the hosting, to help resolve some of these issues.

To be honest, I have never seen more than 60 people online at one time (on the forum, I mean) and in theory, that shouldn’t affect the speed of the forum too much. I run a couple of forums that have that many people quite often, without it affecting the performance of the forum (although perhaps only between 30 – 100 people online on the actual web site for that forum)

Apart from the one recent (apparently?) template error, a lot of the problems the users have seen here recently seem to be MySQL errors, which are (in simple terms) database connection problems.

To some extent, the actual performance of the forum depends a lot on what people are doing on the forum whilst they’re here. Every time anyone clicks on anything, it results in a database query, one of the resource draining aspects for the server - with phpBB forums, the search query is usually the most draining – and with the number of posts on this forum, I bet the database tables for the word search is huge! (I regularly empty those tables on my own forum databases, just to help keep the size of the database down to a manageable size).

At a practical level, I’d say that one way to improve the overall performance of the forum (rather than the site) might be to host the forum and its database on a different server to all the other aspects of FB. Or even have a mirror of the forum on a different server? (something that I might even consider hosting).

Just my 2 cents worth, based on general ‘forum’ knowledge, rather than specific knowledge of this particular forum.

The website will be hosted in a cluster in about 4-6 weeks - and someone else will ensure that the website is running smoothly.

It may happen that there are errors occasionally as I am also working on a relaunch of the website and I am testing various things on the live server.....

The relaunch may take another 2-3 weeks.
(http://www.flirtbox.net/flirtbox_suggestions/which-colour-scheme-do-you-prefer-.html)

The "too many users" message means "too many connections" - this is either due to too many users or due to crashed mysql tables that will be repaired in the background and cost so much performance, that the database server can not accept any more connections.

The main problem is that the forum is based on phpbb which is not very well designed.

There are tables that contain the posts and topics that are updated all the time (increasing the views counter etc...)...while those tables are updated, they are locked for reading. As the tables are huge, it takes a long time. This is also why currently the views counter is only updated at night.

Could not get on the site at all yesterday and it also looks like a few peoples profiles have disappeared in the meantime (could just be coincidence I suppose). Dunno whether to leave this site for a six week period or not
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The last 2 or 3 days the site was almost unusable I have to admit. I have changed some settings last night and I hope it works. The problem is that the webserver sometimes uses more memory then it should....until the server becomes really slow and finally dies It all used to work last week - and as there have been no changes and not more users then last week, this is really strange. Usually I would just order a new server - the problem is I am going to change the webhoster next month anyway - so it is a bit of a problem to find a solution for the next 4 weeks...most contracts for webservers are 1-2 years and it is impossible to find a "temporary server" for just a month....but maybe I can solve it by finding the right configuration settings in the meantime.

Well the website has been up and running for 935:51.96 (935 minutes 51 seconds and 96/100 seconds) so far - so about 15 hours without a crash!



Let's wait and see how the server behaves tonight when the number of visitors doubles....