Hello,

we do have a Mybb Forum running since about 8 months. We started with a webhosting package, however as we have been faced with serious performance problems during the last 2 months we decided to change to a V-Server. As I am a completely newbie regarding running a V-Server I asked an experienced person to install this server for me.

Now the problem: I have been using the spicefuse shoutbox since about 8 months without any problems. When the performance problems of our webhosting package began coming up, we did not think about, that the shoutbox could be one of the reasons. We changed to a V-server a few days ago and we have been faced again with serious performance problems. After about 1 hour the load average raised to 25 and CPU of at least 99%.
I asked the person who installed the server to check the system and he modified the apache a little bit. As this had not the impact to the performance as we hoped, we decided to deacitivate the shoutbox as the access.log file showed a huge requests of the shoutbox (few times a second). Since the shoutbox has been deactivated, we do have load average below 1 and CPU of about 30% when a lot of people are in the forum.

As it is mentioned that the spicefuse shoutbox uses minimal resources of the system, I do have the question, what the reason can be, that it will effect our V-Server as mentioned above. I hope I succeed to explain my problem and sorry for not telling any details at the moment...I am a newbie but I am willed to learn. ;)

What's the refresh time set to? I recommend you do not set it below 30 seconds. Also, please provide a link to your forum so that I can test whether or not there's a configuration problem. I would make sure AJAX requests are being sent every 30 seconds or as specified. Use FireBug (firefox extension) to monitor the ajax requests.

Did you upgrade to the recent version of the shoutbox? If you did, and you did enable flood control, then it could be the reason when there are many shouts in the table. And how many shouts do you have? Although I doubt that will have any impact. It's more to do with the number of requests being sent I think. If not that, it should be the number of shouts you have (100,000+?). Just do a purge in that case.

Hello Pacifier,

the refresh time due to the js-file is set to 60. The refresh time, which will be set via ACP had been 3 seconds. Otherwise a conversation between users will be a little difficulty. ;)
The url to my forum is w w w.grunzl.com/forum but the shoutbox is disabled at the moment. If you would like to see it in action I can send you a test account and perhaps we could agree on a certain time, so I would activate the shoutbox for this.

I did not upgrade to the new version as i thought it is only for 1.4. By the way, shouts will be deleted when they reach a quantity of about 3000.

I have just downloaded the FireBug but I have to get familiar with it first.

Edit:
with this FireBug Extension I get a lot of XML requests in a short time which have an according impact on my load average. When I compare this with the requests of your shoutbox on this site, you have only a few in the same time.

This post was last modified: 08-12-2008 10:58 PM by Jockl.

Have you been able to figure out how many requests go in in a time interval of, let's say 10 seconds? I would recommend setting the refresh time to 10-15 seconds at the minimum. Furthermore, I would advice your system admin to enable KeepAlive on apache and set KeepAliveTimeout to something like 4-5, i.e. if it's not already enabled.

This post was last modified: 08-13-2008 04:24 AM by Pacifier.

Hello Pacifier,

I do have about 30 requests per 10 seconds. It seems that quantity of requests do not depend on the refresh time set via the ACP. I changed this from 3 up to 15 seconds but the number of requests are still high.
KeepAlive is On an I changed KeepAliveTimeout from 2 up to 5. Unfortunately, after restarting apache nothing has changed to a better load average.

Then it's probably missing something in the javascript. View the html source of the page and see if you do see something like this:

Yes, I do have these lines in the source of my site:

refreshInterval=10 for 10 seconds

I'm not sure how can it send too many requests when you have set the refreshInterval to 10. Have you tried bumping it up to 60 or something to see if there's a difference in the number of requests being sent?

And are you using the extension on Firefox?

With setting refreshInterval to 60 the quantity of requests is significant lower. However, there is alomost no difference e.g. between 10 and 30 for refreshInterval.
I use the FireBug with FF but I am not very familiar in interpreting its results.

How's the load when you set it to 30 seconds? And you never mentioned how many pages/shouts do you have in your database?