Donations to Upgrade Forum Server?

Questions and comments
dot_com_vet
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Post by dot_com_vet »

Most consultants I know would bill $2k/day. $80/hour is actually pretty cheap.
But I agree, better to DIY if we can, that's the ERE way.


Spartan_Warrior
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Post by Spartan_Warrior »

Bigato, check your PMs.
($2k/day! I need to get into this business. Maybe I shouldn't be passing up this free experience, LOL. On the other hand, if the $2k/day is for "diagnosing and solving the server latency issue" and not "converting the forums" then it might seem more reasonable.)


dot_com_vet
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Post by dot_com_vet »

For comparison, GeekSquad charges $299 for a home appointment. If a jr. technician makes three calls/day, that's billing $1k/day.
$2k/day would be for a senior engineer. Good money, but getting there might be a 20 year journey.


Spartan_Warrior
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Post by Spartan_Warrior »

I'm glad you started on this bigato. It allowed me to accept yet another offer for overtime today without any guilt about putting this off again. :) Good luck.
So the server died in the middle of me downloading the database, giving me an incomplete file? LOL geez. I might've never realized.
Sorry to hear the import script didn't work. It sounds like you figured out the reason for that, but one of the reasons I gave you the credentials was because I thought it would be more accurate to copy the files and folder structure from the server to your test server rather than running a conversion with a clean installation of bbPress--just in case the installation on the server is unique (e.g. modified by plug-ins, etc). Not sure if that could have anything to do with the script's lack of success.


Mr.Moai
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Post by Mr.Moai »

I agree that the best long term solution is to migrate the forum to a more modern and maintainable stack however we may get a few quick wins by optimizing current deployment until the migration is complete.
Do we actually know what's the bottleneck/root cause here? I understand that bbpress is not very efficient piece of software but I would recommend to take a step back and evaluate the performance of entire platform to get a better understanding about the problem. Likely an inefficient handling of db queries by the php code in combination with limitation of the DB itself but I'd like to gather some more data to get more detailed answer.
Can someone please provide more details about the server and its configuration?
1) Is this VPS? what's the HW spec?

2) Is this built on top of LAMP? What Operating System / Distribution, version, architecture, daemon versions?

3) Is the DB and Web running on the same server?

4) run following commands for basic diagnostic when the system is under heavy load:

uname -a > uname-a.out
uptime > uptime.out
iostat -x 5 5 > iostat.out
sysctl -a > sysctl.out
df -h > df-h.out
df -i > df-i.out
vmstat -s > vmstat-s.out
vmstat -t 5 5 > vmstat-t.out
ps -fuax > ps-fuax.out
top -b -d 5 -n 4 > top.out
free -m > free-m.out
ifconfig -a > ifconfig-a.out
mpstat -P ALL 5 4 > mpstat-p.out
netstat -s > netstat-s.out
#Please replace <backtick> with an actual backtick as I couldn't figure out how to display it.
for i in <backtick>pgrep "(mysql|httpd|apache|php)"</backtick>; do pidstat -t -p $i 3 3 >> pidstat.out; done
tar cfz out.tgz *.out
If you could send me out.tgz, php.ini, apache and mysql config I can have a closer look.
Thanks.


KevinW
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Joined: Mon Aug 02, 2010 4:45 am

Post by KevinW »

This is great progress!
BTW since we are migrating off a suspected-insecure service it is probably proper to have everyone change their password anyway. So I say don't worry about that.


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jennypenny
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Post by jennypenny »

What about the embedded links? Will they work, or at least copy?


anomie
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Location: midwest, usa

Post by anomie »

Sounds like you are making excellent progress bigato!
Go, bigato! Go! *Rah* *Rah*


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jennypenny
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Post by jennypenny »

Looks great! I have a question though.
Sometimes people on the forum want to/need to change their name from the username they created. The way we've always gotten around that is by changing the "name" in the user profile and then choosing to be identified by their "name" instead of their "username" in the profile preferences. Will we still be able to do that?
FYI the board is down at the moment


llorona
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Location: SF Bay Area

Post by llorona »

@Bigato - It looks really good! Thanks for all the work you've put into this project.


SkaraBrae
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Post by SkaraBrae »

I've been poking around the new forums and have some questions:
1. By default word censoring is enabled in display options for the user. Will there actually be a word censor list? If so, will it be humorous? :P
2. There doesn't appear to be a way to change the number of posts per page, and it's currently set at 10. I personally prefer 20 or 25/page. Are there plans to change the default or let users choose their own settings? (Looks like you can get a plugin to do that.)


SkaraBrae
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Post by SkaraBrae »

Thanks bigato! 25 per page is much better!
Re: stress testing. Usually what broke other forums I was on, was the search feature. People would search, it wouldn't find what they were looking for, so they'd search repeatedly (all while other users are browsing the forum normally, of course, chewing up more bandwidth). I'm not sure how we can stress test that without getting a bunch of people over at once, or someone creating/running some scripts to simulate that kind of activity. It's definitely beyond my knowledge.


SkaraBrae
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Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 1:03 am

Post by SkaraBrae »

Just checked out the avatar feature - has it been deliberately set up so users have to link a URL for their avatar and can't upload from computer? If you use a URL for an avatar image, is it being uploaded/cached to the forum server or is it being hotlinked from the original site?
P.S. I also set it to keep me logged in always but every time I close the tab and go back, I'm logged out again and have to re-enter my info. Dunno if that's just something on your test server though, as opposed to something on the live environment.
P.P.S. Just tried testing images in signatures with an obnoxiously large image (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... _Night.jpg). Could we set up a max image dimension/size, as for avatars, for images in signatures? Forum should probably have a way to auto-shrink or flat out reject image tags in signatures that are too big.


SkaraBrae
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Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 1:03 am

Post by SkaraBrae »

The login feature is fixed, and the site correctly denied a too-large image when I tried to edit my signature.
Thanks for all putting in the time and effort to get everything not only up and running, but "just so". It's super appreciated.


My_Brain_Gets_Itchy
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Post by My_Brain_Gets_Itchy »

@bigato:
Amazing job @bigato. Good on you for taking this on and getting this done.
I admire your stick-to-ititveness and problem solving.
Will this make you the perm sys admin of the site now? ;)
FWIW, I think you've proven to be perfect for the role.


fireere
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Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2013 7:40 am

Post by fireere »

Long time lurker, but thought I'd chime in for this. I was just wondering if there's a way to default phpBB to a "latest discussions" view like the current forum is setup? I think that's my favorite feature about this forum because I know I'd miss interesting stuff if I had to dig through individual sub-forums. If you're logged into phpBB "View New Posts" gives you something similar although it's not quite the same since if you logout and then back in that whole list disappears even if you haven't read them, but it's not even an option if you're not logged in. Thanks for all the hard work bigato.


jacob
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Post by jacob »

@bigato - I don't think the server is necessarily totally down when the error message appears. It's just unable to serve that particular request. "All our operators are currently busy, please hold."
I think a Pareto explanation is more likely. Most hits are lurkers. Many are one time search engine hits. Many won't click because they don't see how they can help. Many won't click more than once. All in all, the only people likely to click are regulars who are also software savvy.
FVIW, when I did those survey polls on the blog, it took a week to get 200 people to click. Compare to the traffic of 20000+ visitors.
I think in general, over the internet, one can only expect an active reaction (feedback) from about 1% of the people. It's the same thing with book reviews. Ten thousand copies sold -> about 100 reviews.


jacob
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Post by jacob »

The forums need a theme. Bigato sent me a link to different themes. The closest one I found was
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... 12c6d9fa06


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jennypenny
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Post by jennypenny »

>>I think in general, over the internet, one can only expect an active reaction (feedback) from about 1% of the people.

It's the same response rate with fundraising. Curious.
@Toska--you can change the order of posts from descending to ascending in your user profile


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jennypenny
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Post by jennypenny »

Should the theme be less obvious for people browsing at work?


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