Overall Site Slowness...

[MadItalian]

A couple of months ago, we started seeing random slowness with pages both public and admin. No updates had been done. I had the site owner re-subscribe, and updated the forum and plug-ins. That seemed to clear up the issue for a couple of weeks, but performance has gone downhill again. I've tried rebuilding the caches but that didn't appear to help. So I've been trying to see if the mySQL indexes might need to be rebuilt, but there is little information on what indexes Xenforo needs.

CPU seems to be running about 20% of total available, and we have 1GB (of 16GBs) of memory free once the site is up and running. mySQL takes about 6 GBs itself. The forum is medium in usage size, 350 posts per day, 600 reactions per day based on the forum statistics. With approx 600+ active users per day.

I've run the site under google dev tools and 100% of the delay is server side, so it's not any UI issue.

We only have 7 plugins:

• XD Collapsible Sections
• First post edit time limit
• tapatalk
• Xenforo Enahanced Search
• Xenforo Importers
• Xenforo Media Gallery
• Xenforo Redirects for VBulletin

Any ideas where to keep poking around would be appreciated.

 

[jeb35]

I thought there were some issues with Tapatalk?

 

[ekool]

Look at the I/O wait on the server.
Run mysqltop and see if there are any queries that are taking forever.
Enable the php status page so you can see if there are lots of php processes taking a long time (https://www.php.net/manual/en/fpm.status.php)

That's where I would start. My guess it's one of the first two slowing your site down.

 

[MadItalian]

Good ideas, thanks.

 

[ekool]

Linux will always use nearly all of your memory regardless... if only on caches and stuff so not having free memory doesn't really mean anything.

 

[eva2000]

Besides server-side optimisations, remember to check your legitimate traffic profiles. Several of my server optimisation clients I've done work for in the past week have had issues with one particular aggressive spider bot = Bytespider, from Bytedance from folks at Tiktok crawling the web for their search engine product. It ignores robots.txt and can pound sites very aggressively for crawling.

On the origin server side, I calculated up to 1,000+ crawl requests/second for days and weeks on end! It hit Xenforo proxy.php pretty hard, too. So, it will punish your PHP server configuration if left unchecked as not many server setups will out of the box have PHP capable of handling 1,000+ uncached PHP requests/sec

If your server is optimised, the Bytespider bot won't impact you too much, but if not, it can probably crash your server or slow it to a crawl very easily!

Think of it as a good load stress test of your server revealing any weaknesses in your current server configuration that you may need to tune up and address

Example of traffic filtered for just Bytespider useragent for past 30 days - Bytespider started pounding this server around September 2, 2023 - sharp drop after started creating custom Cloudflare WAF Firewall rules Server CPU utilisation dropped from pegged at 90+ % to 30-50%

 

[ekool]

That's nuts, they don't have good rate limiting on their spider apparently. Good tip.

 

[KensonPlays]

tapatalk

Wasn't that removed from the Play Store as well on Android? Not sure about iPhone since I've never had one.

 

[eva2000]

That's nuts, they don't have good rate limiting on their spider apparently. Good tip.

This thread's similar threads list has https://xenforo.com/community/threads/possible-php-issue.216207/ and again Bytespider is culprit and reported 1000 concurrent requests. So seems their rate limit is 1,000 requests/second LOL