Phpbb load

#1

Hi,
I moved a phpbb forum from a dedicated machine at another provider to Dreamhost because the forum was loading the box a bit too much.

Within about 10 minutes of users starting to be redirected here, the machine (a crazy-domain-insane plan) ground to a halt with a load average over 50, and a few minutes after that stopped responding to ping.

I then undid the redirection so my users would be back on my old box, and set up the forums on a test domain here. I had six people click around on the forum, and the load average climbed to 1.

I see all sorts of people having success running phpbb forums here - what could I be doing wrong? Are the servers here just not made to handle even small loads like 6 to 20 or 30 simultaneous phpbb users?

I’d really like to get this working on dreamhost rather than having to go back to running it on my other box, but if it crashes the machine after a few minutes of use, I can’t really do that…

Daniel

#2

Well if it’s already overloading a dedicated machine, it’s probably not going to work out that well on a shared hosting machine (which costs (you) a lot less money and has a lot of other customers on it). That said, I don’t see any other big resource hogs on that machine… I don’t know what to tell you here really. Even that small test put you up there as the top user of system resources on that machine yesterday (and obviously we can’t allow you to keep crashing the machine). That machine’s a dual 2.4 ghz xeon with 1.5 Gb of memory - beefier than most of our dedicated offerings.

I don’t know of any specific examples of phpbb boards running happily on shared hosting plans, but phpbb is pretty common, so I imagine some folks here may be able to comment on that.

#3

We have one running happily (note the url :slight_smile: ) http://www.happylittlethings.com/forum/

We even have more posts and it’s an active forum and the load is really light.

It looks like a phpbb 2.2 snapshot release which I know can bring down a whole server. We ran it for fun at my school on a redhat box and it crashed the box a lot.

I’d really look at using a standard install/version of phpbb. You would loose all your posts but there isn’t going to be an upgrade from the dev snapshot anyway to phpbb 2.2

Btw, I know it says 2.0.10 but it looks and acts exactly like 2.2

willscorner.net

#4

Flash definitely isn’t the problem - Flash is client side.

#5

Yeah, I think this is the problem.

I hadn’t realized that we were running “Fully Modded PHPbb” (a friend of mine did the original setup).

Apparently that has EVERY mod applied – all 364 of them (that’s not a typo).

I had a nice long talk with him about just how badly he actually NEEDS the “MP3 Player with windshield-wiper animation and scented toilet paper delivery” modification… I will be attempting to backport the database contents to a more vanilla install based on a STABLE phpbb version.

#6

Two weeks ago the Economist had a technology special. The upshot is that “feature rich” doesn’t cut it. Software needs to be as simple as possible (but no simpler). One engineer used the “Mom Test” when developing Windows 95. His mom wanted to know how to turn the computer off. “Oh you do that with the start button.” Not that obvious really.