SCF Slow To Load At Times

I haven't noticed any slowness for the last several days.

Dale

Isn't it always that way. Go to the doctor and all of a sudden, no cough. Fast and zippy at the moment here too. A more robust test plan is needed. This is a pretty regular problem.

I am a good 'test' since I access the site on average every 5-10 minutes 15 hours per day. There are times, which typically last about 5 minutes, when the site is inaccessible. This has been occurring (on average) about once an hour over the last week. It has been an issue for quite some time.

Here is my theory...
As I mentioned before, I am think that this is related to someone using the SCF search with a board search term.

No need to extensive testing, I can easily replicate this (and just did in the last 4 minutes) and it absolutely pegs the server (at least on my machine). Going to another PC in my house when I did this and the SCF site was inaccessible while the search was hung on my machine. Searching on 'hinge' results in the error message below after a few minutes of hanging.

I assume that there is no simple solution other than loading a trebuchet with cash and throwing the money at it with a new, dedicated indexing server. You cannot expect to do a full text search across over a decade of posts (Bobby how many posts are there? 250,000?) on a standard server without it nailing the CPUs to the wall.

Bobby could play with the index server and greatly lower its priority. This would prevent the entire site from hanging up but would make the SCF search painfully slow (i.e. unusable).

Another possible solution is to change the search timeout to something really short, like 15 seconds. Again, this would greatly impact the search capability but would improve the website-wide performance.

Don

How about I look at forcing the searcher to specify at least a category instead of sitewide?

The other option is to move the database to SQL Server from MySQL, which will cost money for the move and monthly.

We moved the Coin Forum to it years ago, it's DB just passed 8GB, that's huge and we don't have this issue there.

In my informal testing, the thread title search does not impact the site-performance. So in my opinion I agree that limiting the search to a forum category should make a substantial improvement.

Longer term, perhaps a 'go-find-me' type donation drive here in the community would help raise money to go towards a new server? The rub with that is an MS SQL server has to be fed licensing fees every year, so it would not be a one time ROI.
Don

I'll look into how much, my host has a super hyped up server for SQL that is shared. It's got about a hundred DBs on it, most very small. The coin forum runs on it great. I'd probably have to pay Rui to move it, given the size not quite sure how tricky it is.

There's also likely some things that would break with the switch and need to be fixed.

I ask again that you consider using the Google search instead, exclusively.
- It is consistently very fast. I noticed a while back that someone was playing around with number of result pages generated, now set at 10 but seen as high as 15. Something like "Washington Franklin" or "Canada" (rather ridiculous search terms, but not to a beginner) would need more. Even when set at 15 result pages, there was no slowness perceived.
- It is not limited to threads indexed back 5(?) years as a browser-based Google search often does. I've found threads going back to the earliest days of SCF using the Google search.
- It finds more entries than the old search engine, but that may be more because it does a looser search. Delimiting a search using quotes works just fine; this needs to be stated.
- Are more searches conducted with limits (by forums, dates, usernames) than those without? The latter are the ones that take a long time to generate results and the ones I suspect cause longer system delays.
-- adding a username to the Google search text works just fine. There should be a similar workaround for the other categories(?)
-- can the list generated by Google search be sorted by date, newest first? That would take care of searching by date.
- Do the ads generated by Google search benefit SCF in any way?

I disagree with hy-brasil's recommendation. I loathe Google's site search as an only search option, as there is no way to constrain a search to a particular category in the forum.

It's great as an additional option, but it should never be the ONLY message board option, in my opinion.

We're tinkering with a new search page that looks promising. Hoping to have it tested fully and up and running early next week.

All inclusive searches with no time limit for "stamp" are fairly consistently returning over 3500 pages of results in under 6 seconds.

Sweet! Thanks Bobby.

Thanks for everything Bobby. Rough evening. Took about 20 minutes to get in, then when I clicked on this thread it took about 15 minutes to finally load. Crossing my fingers.

It's hard for me to understand as I have no issues.

Bobby, below is a screen capture of what I received last evening while using the site. While waiting for a page to load. To say the least it was kind of frustrating as I was not performing any searches, just reading through some threads. We know you guys are doing your best and thank you in advance for keeping the site working at optimal performance, as I appreciate that things from another dimension can cause havoc on your site from time to time.




Mike

Does this site run in the cloud? Perhaps using a backend like Amazon's RDS and some of the autoscaling features can mitigate things around peak usage times and dormancy.