Where is the site hosted physically?

I'll donate a Dual Xeon 550 with 512 Mb RAM and a 7 bay internal SCSI cage with a RAID5 controller and dual, redundant power supplies, you'd just have to buy some decent sized disks and some more RAM. It's a non Rack-mountable Gateway server, but it would get the job done. All I would ask is that it doesn't also get used to host **** sites.

 

Zand,

That attachment table is what caused a lot of problems, I need to take a look at it but it's pretty painful cause at 55,000+ attachments the file attribute lookups are locking tables and causing a major backlog on the SQL side, hopefully we can address it. Right now I'm more interested in getting the SQL db fixed and backing up as it was last night it refused to dump to a file for backup.

 

Nice,

I really appreciate it but I think if we are going to do a hardware upgrade I'm just gonna push Kyle into another PowerEdge 1750/1850

- John

 

JForum, Resin, and PostgreSQL. Actually, I'm not sure if you will be able to use Resin freely for this site; just go with JBoss.

PHP is a huge mess for anything larger than a 100 line script that will never see the light of day. Connection pooling and advanced caching are impossible because PHP was designed without shared or persistent operations in mind. The language's type system is terrible; its primitives are a huge blur and its class system is totally unenforced. It is is essentially typeless, making development and verification extremely painful. It may have quick and convenient shortcuts - like making all arrays hashtables - but these shortcuts ultimately bog down the entire application.

If you've ever taken a look at the PHP source (at some point I was thinking of extending a language feature), it is horrid. PHP 3 was at least lean and mean; PHP 4 is hopelessly bloated and massive. It is bigger than Apache and probably as big as PostgreSQL at this point. The difference is those are excellent, functional pieces of software that fulfill complex tasks.

Poor languages beget poor software. PHP's answer to CPAN, PEAR, is one of the worst software collections in existence. The lack of a solid software base leads to endless reinvention of the wheel. PHP software tends to be littered with custom, incomplete database abstraction layers and input validators. Keep in mind that it's all usually written by people who should really be sysadmins or web designers.

If you need to do some web scripting, then use Python. If you want something that is industrial strength, use Java. PHP has no purpose and no future.

Thanks to all the novice programmers that find PHP easy to install and learn, PHP has a ton of momentum. But eventually it will collapse under its own weight. Expect php.net to be sold to the "People Helping People" organization for $50 in about 5 or 6 years.

In case you were wondering, I just finished a pretty large project in PHP. Needless to say, I am never touching that language again.

 

As far as MySQL is concerned, I don't hate it nearly as much as I used to. Great..after 5 years, it finally has transactions and subqueries. In my opinion, there is really no reason to run MySQL when PostgreSQL exists.

 

Are you using FastCGI for compiled php page caching? If not, I suggest using it immediately, you'll see a huge improvement.

 

Hahaha,

Sounds like a lot of personal preference and pom pom'ing for more structured languages. PHP is definetly a multiple function tool, but you can trim it down to where it's not so much overhead all you gotta do is learn now to read:

./configure --help and remove the stuff you don't need or ever will need..

JForums? Sorry no way am I moving to a java based package that hasn't even scaled to a large system, much less just now outta beta.. Check out http://www.big-boards.com and look at all the top boards.. Sure are a lot of php based systems out there...

BTW, I'm not trying to start a flame war, I really do appreciate good banter, but I'm not going to dive off into a language/package/system that I'm not familiar with at this point. If it was my own site I might be more willing and usually do try alternative packages.. I have seen some pretty vicious posts about downtime and problems, so I'm going to approach these problems with the software/package/system that I'm comfortable with.

 

I certainly don't expect you to convert My350Z to run different forum software that you aren't comfortable with. Just do what is easy and works

That being said, PHP is terrible, personal preferences aside. The main problem isn't overhead. It's that it wasn't built with persistent or shared operations in mind. This isn't HTTP 1.0.

Just compare the quality of reusable Java software versus PHP software. I cannot think of a single well designed PHP application or library. Compare CPAN or the Java API to PEAR. Compare JBoss or Resin to Zend. Compare Hibernate to...well, there isn't a proper object-relational mapper for PHP.

The only reason major forums run PHP is that they start out small and PHP is easy to install. They become bigger and experience scalability problems. Instead of using better software, they implement their own slew of fixes and throw more servers into the mix. I believe that is currently where My350Z is

 

While these are all reasonable statements, the underlying truth here is that vBulletin is a turn-key application that is built around L.A.M.P., and there's probably no way on this planet this forum is going to be re-written to use an application like JBoss or Resin (Unless I saw your volunteering hand go up ). I don't know what miracle finally convinced the site owner to spend some support dollars to maintain/fix/upgrade the site, but expecting a complete re-design to a custom middle-tier/back-end is not realistic. I'm no programmer or scripter (since PHP is an interpreted language), but I can say with relative certainty that unless there was a "portability tool" to convert away from vBulletin to another, non-PHP/MySQL forums platform, it's never going to happen.

You know the logic....

if (forum == !broke); then
don't fix it
else
spend minimal dollars to upgrade
enjoy profit
fi

 

Comparing a rapid application design language to a structured developed language is like comparing a 350z to an F150

Honestly, it's not even that, it's still a single machine with an IDE hard drive in it. The major problem was a simple apache change, and the tuning of mysql to use more than 16M of memory!! That was 90% of the problem, the other was letting the database drive fill up a couple times and causing some major hassles as you know what that'll do. It took me an hour to repair the tables this morning! But they look like they'll survive.

 

Seems slick. Seems much faster, and the avatar's are back. And - it looks like we can post pictures again. All's well with the world.

But - Will it stay that way

Lou

 

Yes it will, definitely.

Victor

 

Seems much faster....thanks for your efforts.....

 

Well, this is about the only time I am HAPPY about having to retract a previous statements:
Well Done.

I would like to directly thank John (silverhand) and Kyle (Godzilla) for you excellent work on getting the server back up to speed, my hat is off to you and your handy work. I hope you both will be sticking around for a long time into the future to make sure that it stays in working condition.

Andrew

 

Thanks Andrew..
BTW I'm sure we will be around for a long time

 

Cape Verde Islands

 

All the site needs now is this:



That and a couple of Type R stickers on the server and we'll be flying!

 

...well I can only post pics that are "one bytes" or smaller? What's going on?

 

I disagree.

Edit: Oh I see, your a Java guy.

 

The attachment table still has problems, I've got to dump out the table and find out what's wrong with it, it looks right now like the entire thing is corrupt though which might be bad news...

- John