Administrivia: New HTTP server

[loftar]

During the server crash right now, I had the opportunity to observe the HTTP server handling more than 100 requests per second. Apart from one bug (using a too small backlog on the listening socket; now fixed), it handled it better than I expected. However, it turns out that the MySQL daemon suddenly turned into the bottleneck for the forum, which surprises me, because it has always seemed to handle every load without even taking a breather.

Does someone with more experience of phpBB perhaps know if there's any known, common way to tweak MySQL to make it handle these loads better? Judging from "mysqladmin processlist", it seems the main bottleneck is the "sessions" table. In particular, there seems to be a lot of DELETE operations waiting for its lock, which I also find a bit peculiar -- do that many sessions really need to be deleted all the time?

[Granger]

During the server crash right now, I had the opportunity to observe the HTTP server handling more than 100 requests per second. Apart from one bug (using a too small backlog on the listening socket; now fixed), it handled it better than I expected. However, it turns out that the MySQL daemon suddenly turned into the bottleneck for the forum, which surprises me, because it has always seemed to handle every load without even taking a breather.

Does someone with more experience of phpBB perhaps know if there's any known, common way to tweak MySQL to make it handle these loads better? Judging from "mysqladmin processlist", it seems the main bottleneck is the "sessions" table. In particular, there seems to be a lot of DELETE operations waiting for its lock, which I also find a bit peculiar -- do that many sessions really need to be deleted all the time?

You should take a look at the session expunge function, iirc is something that is run every x requests.
Under changing loads it may be better to move that to a cronjob.

[loftar]

Actually, I found that it helped a lot to run mysqloptimize on the table.

Getting a lot of zeros in the past hour. That is, a blank page with nothing but "0" (sans quotes) in the top left corner. Refreshing fixes it, but it'd kinda annoying.

By the way, is this still happening? I still haven't gotten it once.

[Potjeh]

Haven't had it in a while.

[genusis]

Actually, I found that it helped a lot to run mysqloptimize on the table.

Getting a lot of zeros in the past hour. That is, a blank page with nothing but "0" (sans quotes) in the top left corner. Refreshing fixes it, but it'd kinda annoying.

By the way, is this still happening? I still haven't gotten it once.

by removing old posts as well as marking unread stuff to read for everyone once in a while can help improve it.

[Caliku]

phpBB does not do well with mySQL. Pretty much requires a dedicated server to run.

I'd see about having a cronjob clear out the tables that are bogging it down.


EDIT: I conferred with an administrator today and they confirmed that phpBB is resource hog of a script, 5-10 users logged continuously causes 25 concurrent connections to SQL. I can only imagine the amount of connections this forum generates. Although this would be for our servers, which run CentOS on PHP5. Not exactly sure of the setup of your server but if you filled me in I could ask for their sagely wisdom tomorrow.

Do the game server and the forums still share the same box?