Really poor performance compared to VB...

[RobParker]

They added innodb_buffer_pool_size=400MB and we saw an immediate improvement with the load descending from 3 to 0.5. I just wondered if there were any other similar settings.

Also our database is about 2GB in total, would you say 400MB there is a reasonable value?

 

[estranged]

They added innodb_buffer_pool_size=400MB and we saw an immediate improvement with the load descending from 3 to 0.5. I just wondered if there were any other similar settings.

Also our database is about 2GB in total, would you say 400MB there is a reasonable value?

It is best to set the value of innodb_buffer_pool_size a little bit higher then your total innodb data size if you have enough ram.

 

[Carlos]

I'm sitting over here looking all confused like this:

"Poor performance compared to vB." You say. I'm sorry, but I disagree because xenForo requires less server resources than vB.

I've seen my own 2500+ members site use less resources than when I was with vB3, or vB4. But with vB3, I really loved the system, so server resources didn't really concern me.

 

[RobParker]

"Poor performance compared to vB." You say. I'm sorry, but I disagree because xenForo requires less server resources than vB.

Now that we've set innodb_buffer_pool_size the performance is much better. Without it, it was horrible.

 

[CTXMedia]

I suspect a good number of people migrating to XF do not have InnoDB properly configured (or at least haven't used it previously so have not had the need to tweak it) - I know I didn't use it at all when I was on vB and only used it for a couple of tables when I was on IPB.

Glad you've sorted it though - it's a pain when your sites are running slow and you know they can run much faster!!

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Carlos]

I suspect a good number of people migrating to XF do not have InnoDB properly configured (or at least haven't used it previously so have not had the need to tweak it) - I know I didn't use it at all when I was on vB and only used it for a couple of tables when I was on IPB.

That applies to me. I moved my posts from vB4 to xenForo no problem. Didn't hinder my server.

 

[RobParker]

That applies to me. I moved my posts from vB4 to xenForo no problem. Didn't hinder my server.

You probably wouldn't notice it if you only had a few people online. We had no problems on our test boards when we only had our staff online and only started noticing the problems when we went live.

 

[Carlos]

You probably wouldn't notice it if you only had a few people online. We had no problems on our test boards when we only had our staff online and only started noticing the problems when we went live.

Nope, we get plenty of traffic every day. When I transferred CODForums from vB4 to xf, everyone was anticipating the release of MW3. It was a busy time. I have another website that brings 1,000 views that same day of the transfer. Nothing happened.

It was vB4 that caused numerous errors, and even in vB3, which in feb I upgraded to vB4. My server was hindered while with vB4, lots of slowdowns.

Nevermind that it had a lot of hacks, I disabled about half of them to see how the server would handle the stress, but no, each time I upgraded vB4, it got worse. I gave chance after chance, after chance until one vb4 update broke my site via errors not only from the front end, but also on the backend. Regardless of the fact there were a lot of users browsing, I transferred the site over to xenforo. The next few hours, my friend moved the server over to a new one.

I told him that it was a bad time to move servers because it was busy.

 

[DBA]

I'm sitting over here looking all confused like this:

"Poor performance compared to vB." You say. I'm sorry, but I disagree because xenForo requires less server resources than vB..

Yes stock vs stock, it took me awhile to get XF running as fast as our vb 4 was. However our XF setup is now faster, mostly thanks to the image sprites.

 

[RobParker]

Ok, so we just had a peak of traffic (100 users online to 400 users online in the space of a few minutes) and our server load went sky high.

Is any of this giving an idea why it's so bad? (under VB we used to be able to handle this kind of thing fine)






Cheers

 

[RobParker]

After 10 minutes we're back to something sensible (but still higher than the 0.5- 1.0 we normally have)

 

[mrGTB]

Rob seems to be getting similar to what I experienced before when sending tweets into twitter, which then resulted in large amounts of traffic hitting the forum at once taking it down. I saw this happen a few times when using XenForo on my shared hosting and stopped tweeting messages as a result. I'd tweet something, then 2 minutes later the forum was taking ages to load pages, or simply timing out on me showing a server error page. Thing is though, this never happened before when using both MyBB prior to installing XenForo, or vBulletin 3.7.7 after later removing XenForo. Pretty obvious to me there was something going on when mass traffic hit the forum, yet didn't seem to effect the other two "vB and MyBB" tweeting the same way into twitter, getting the same influx of traffic at once.

In the end, not being server minded and all. I put it down to MyBB and vBulletin using MyISAM for database, while XenForo used InnoDB. Maybe the server just wasn't configured for it at all.

 

[Deebs]

Rob,

Out of interest how many httpd processes are you allowing to spawn? You really need to make sure you do not spawn one per client connection as that is just an overkill and can quickly kill a server with many context switches/interrupts. When the load goes high again can you run vmstat 1 for a about 10 seconds and paste the results here. Also, a look at your Apache config would be helpful.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Thread name change ?
Current: Really poor performance compared to VB...
Actual: Poor performance - server setup needs tweaking.

 

[RobParker]

mrGTB: We run a football forum so at the end of matches, etc we get quite big peaks as people come on to discuss the match. VB handled it fine after some initial tweaking and we were handling 3000+ users fine. We're struggling with 500 or so at present.

Deebs: I don't know regarding httpd processes. How would I find out? I'm fairly sure it's not 1 per client as we have 500 users online.

What I think is an unrelated issue that's making it worse is that APC seems to reset every 2 hours and when it does that shoots the load up. We just had a "perfect storm" of a load of traffic coming on and APC resetting which put the load over 100. It's back down to 3 or so now and APC is handling 1000 cache requests per second.

 

[RobParker]

Thread name change ?
Current: Really poor performance compared to VB...
Actual: Poor performance - server setup needs tweaking.

My point was that coming from VB the performance is very poor in comparison. I know the server can handle this kind of traffic with VB and it's not as if it's simply inadequate for the job. I agree it's just a settings tweak and I thought I made that clear in my post.

This might be expected but I suspect you'll get a lot of people in the same situation so I thought the thread title was valid.

 

[Deebs]

mrGTB: We run a football forum so at the end of matches, etc we get quite big peaks as people come on to discuss the match. VB handled it fine after some initial tweaking and we were handling 3000+ users fine. We're struggling with 500 or so at present.

Deebs: I don't know regarding httpd processes. How would I find out? I'm fairly sure it's not 1 per client as we have 500 users online.

What I think is an unrelated issue that's making it worse is that APC seems to reset every 2 hours and when it does that shoots the load up. We just had a "perfect storm" of a load of traffic coming on and APC resetting which put the load over 100. It's back down to 3 or so now and APC is handling 1000 cache requests per second.

View attachment 28396

Find your httpd.conf file and post the contents here after sanitizing it. Also, grab a copy of your apc.ini (or load up a page displaying phpinfo and look for your APC settings).

 

[RobParker]

apc.php output

 

[RobParker]

Is this what you wanted?

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxClients: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 500
ServerLimit 1000
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>

 

[CTXMedia]

Rob, can you also post your my.ini file contents so we can see what's in there too.

Thanks,
Shaun