I've noticed the site has been a tad slow recently, but unfortunately this is due to a lot of new sign ups - spammer sign ups. Just spent the last hour or so cleaning up a good 70+ spammy threads, they don't see the light of day (or Google) because any new user who posts a link or an image goes straight to the moderated queue; where we need to authorise them before they become visible on the forum. Anyhow, I think there is a wave of spam hitting the internet right now, forums and blogs get hit the most. They will get shut down but will start again in a few months, but the good news is for every spammer we catch, that is a spammer who gets their IP address, email and username logged with Stop Forum Spam so it helps protect other websites. I've also implemented a no follow rule in the forum. This means that Google and other search engines don't count the links in the forum towards their SEO counting. It won't help the other site and it won't hurt us (in case a link goes to some dodgy site). One of the ways spammers slow the site down is when there are something like 50+ users trying to sign up at the same time. The system will deny most of them because they are known spammers, but even those slow the site down. So, for the time being I think we will be stuck with occasional slowdowns but things should speed up soon.
I have noticed several times in the last week that I couldnt log on to the site. Maybe once every other day. I just waited till later on each occasion.
I've noticed that it is taking far longer for the site to receive and process contributed messages - and in particular, new threads - than ever before. My recent topic about the Cebu Pacific plane accident took over one hour to be accepted by the site: this was NOT the result of a slow connection because I was able to post other messages on other sites at the same time.
I will be purging the site of potential spam accounts this weekend, got some dormant accounts not doing anything and I doubt they are genuine but usually I've let them be until they post something. Will also look into toughening the anti spam measures and see if there is something I can do to deny access to certain IPs. It might mean blocking Russia, so if there are any Fil-Brit couples in Moscow... Sorry
I meant to mention to you Sean, its been horrendously slow for over a week, at least once it's reported back a database error as well. My gut feeling is that the MySql database queries are performing poorly, unfortunately I don't really know much about MySql but if I had the same problem elsewhere I would have said indexes need rebuilt.
I think the database error was due to the servers as a whole being slow. All my sites went down for about an hour in the last week.. But I have noticed sometimes when I look at who is online there are multiple users trying to sign up, view the members list (which I've now blocked so it isn't available anymore) and of course log in and post. There have been a couple of hack attempts, which is why I've stopped people being able to see the list of usernames on the site, only the ones in the posts.
I've just encountered database errors four times trying to access this thread and I agree with Jim, the indexes may be corrupt. It might be an idea to rebuilt the database - assuming VB provides such a tool - which would also compress it. With regard to your spam problem, I'd suggest installing "ZBBlock" (Google it, it's free) which is very effective, cooperates with SFF and requires very little in the way of resources.
Something I have noticed. If you view posts, under "Todays Posts" when logged in, then they are given the correct date stamp. If you view them when not logged in then they are date stamped an hour earlier! Well on my laptop at home and also at work this is the case.
I'm always logged in but anyway this is just a GMT - DST bug in VBulletin I guess, when you are logged in it is reading the system locale of your browser and making the time adjustment for DST, when logged out the programmers forgot to make that check. I wonder what time it shows if you are logged out and physically in the Phils and your PC is adjusted for the Philippine time zone?
The slowdown isn't the installation or the database. At least I don't think so... The server load averages have risen massively. I'm checking this with the hosting company.
Sean for individual request times to slow down this much the traffic to the host would have to be huge, I mean really huge hundred's or possibly thousands of requests a second, it is possible that the hosting company is in trouble and is throttling your bandwidth but if that is the case I would still not expect several second delays in click-request-response times, that simply wont happen in a low volume site like this! It would be hard to imagine that our traffic would barely put a dent in a tiny fraction of a percent of the performance of a modern server, seriously these kind of problems are much more likely to be poor index design (not your problem you bought a platform) or poor configuration of the indexes i.e. page size too small or the likes. DBA work is a realm unto itself (DBA = Data Base Administrator) the guys that do it well command serious money in the IT field, problem is that you may well be sharing database space with other companies so the MySql instance might be just generally overloaded, no way to tell sadly.
The other possibility is that they are completely virtual and are not allocating enough compute time to you i.e. commensurate with what they gave you in the past. I need to get my CMS finished soon it could do this job and more!
I will have to spend the weekend (ie Sunday as I'm working today) trying to get things sorted with the site. Got a new spammer sign up last night.. Made 70 threads selling dodgy handbags! Took me three clicks to clear them all in one fowl swoop.. Hope that spammer reads this to know his or her hard work ended up as nothing.
What makes you think that? A pretty desperate act to my way of thinking. Mind you, I notice that the owner of another Brit/Fil Website was selling travelling cases recently through his forum. Or trying to.
Even a robot making this kind of quantity of posts should not adversely affect the speed of the site but I do feel your pain at having to manage this kind of garbage.
I am pretty sure that in the past he hosted his own servers so the site actually ran from his own house, maybe he forgot to pay the leccy bill He used to have that kind of downtime fairly regularly but in all honesty there can be lots of reasons for that and many completely legit ones and don't indicate a problem with the supporting technology.
