Running better now?

I’ve installed New Relic to try and narrow down some of the issues we’re having. At this point the PHP agent appears to be working without issue. (was a manual install since openlitespeed isn’t supported “out of the box”)

Once I know what code is causing the database pile-ups I’ll try to work around it.

Thanks, Dave!

-J.

I just truncated the buddypress activity database tables. There was about 800,000 rows in there. New Relic showed it was dragging us down.

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Yea that’s what I thought.

Thanks Dave keep at it. We need it.

Me too!

The clearing out of those tables caused some issues. Groups no longer have any activity postings. I also noticed there are errors with group forums but staging has the same issue so not related to the activity tables.

Another minor issue is the members page only shows users in alphabetical order. The other sorting options rely on the activity data.

I made a database backup before clearing out the activity tables. I’ll work on restoring the group data tomorrow.

I’m also considering clearing out all of the notifications for everyone. There’s about 400,000 rows in that table.

I would agree Dave. We don’t need the notifications. Thank you for working on this for us!!! The vast majority really appreciate it even if they don’t comment (appropriately)!

Looks good to me so far. It has been months without having to reopen multiple times to get the page to load.

I’m afraid there’s still more bumps in the road. I’m going over the database queries that I think I can adjust without breaking anything. I may try switching themes this weekend too, provided I can make the new one match the look/feel of the old one. (as close as possible)

The current theme is ancient in internet time. lol

Thank you Dave!

You’re a good man, Dave. I really appreciate your time and energy spent on the site.

I’m working on replacing how the “today’s topics” are tracked. Currently this data is compiled from an ugly query that will never be fast. If it wasn’t for the caching of this query I think we’d have more issues than we currently have.

Thanks Dave!

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Thanks so much, Dave. I wish I had your talent.

Thanks, everyone.

I know how maddening a slow site can be. I’ll probably be making things worse at times today while I work on the code. Please hang on for the ride. lol

Dave doing the Lord’s work! In my limited time thus far this morning it is lightning fast. Thank you sir!

Thanks Dave! The site seems much faster today.

Not sure how the search function operates on the site, but that can be a HUGE resource hog on databases – maybe eliminate that and encourage people to use Google, etc. to search the site.

We’re already short-circuiting the native wordpress search and sending queries to google when the search box is used.

Right now the slow queries I am seeing are related simply getting topics ordered by recent activity. bbPress is doing this by joining the posts table with the posts meta table and sorting on a meta key/value. Other forum software would typically store the recent activity timestamp with the topic so that no table join is needed.

Jon Jordan wrote:

Thanks, Dave!

-J.

I’ve made the ACID compliance of the database more laxed to help speed up new post inserts. I’m not sure how much help this is though. The trade off is if things crash we could lose up to 60 seconds of data.

Changing to a new theme will take more than a weekend. I forget just how much custom code is in the current one.

Thank you Mr.Lozier.

So far, so much better!! Thank you.

I’ve replaced the “Today’s Topics” widget with “Active Topics”. The data is pulled from a dedicated database table that is updated when new topics or replies are made. This eliminates one of most impactful database queries I have seen in New Relic.

More to come.

Much improved ! Good work !

Thanks Dave

I haven’t gotten any notifications about the site timing out this weekend. I think the changes are helping. Adding a new topic or reply seems to go quicker too.

We’ll see how Monday goes. Hopefully better than the recent ones.

Ben K. wrote:

You’re a good man, Dave. I really appreciate your time and energy spent on the site.

X2!! Thanks for all your hard work, Dave!!

I didn’t have any complaints in the first place since the site is free and the ones who work on fixing it probably are doing voluntary work.

However, it is definitely working better.

Thank you

Seems better than I’ve experienced in quite some time. Almost makes me want to quote somebody and post a link at the same time