At this point if anyone knows a MySQL wiz. Please have them contact us... I think we need to start looking beyond our tech team for help with this.

Ground to a halt at 8:51am and 10:02am Eastern. I'm rooting for ya Geoff!

Ironic, was working fine for the first 10 minutes I was browsing, soon as I click this thread it grinds to a halt.

Today's slow down seems network related. not server. Trying to get ahold of my host provider. GRRR>

BTW Geoff, I've noticed the forum clock is about 7 minutes slow. I know that in my multiple server environment poor time synchronization can cause serious issues. Have your server guys look into NTP services to have all your servers sync up to one of the public time servers. It's a free technique with many benefits.

My intranet is broken..

Time issue solved. I put in another support ticket with Vbulletin and tried to turn up the heat with our host provider to see if we can get this sucker solved.

Thank you everyone for being so understanding. It pains me to see the forum slow and hear that members of the forum are having issues with it. I'm looking forward to the day when we can have this puppy up and running smoothly.

For what it's worth, I kinda see DVD Talk as one HUGE OCTOPUSOTIC site, in that there's like one thousand, one thousand mile long, freight train-like arms that contain a few thousand tentacles each (that represent its members), demanding the processing of a SHATLOAD of information (much at the same time, a lot of the time), and I'm (for one) most pleased that it runs as smoothly as it does.

I would like to agree with The Edit King. I would like to, but I can't figure out what the hell he said.

I posted this in the "posts quoted posts" thread, but thought it applied here as well...


I have had the locking problem, but only with LONG posts with links (or anything with an external URL, like images etc.)

I have waited several minutes of frustration before shutting down IE. Guess I didn't wait it out correctly. But it isn't just for replies (or 'reply with quote'). For example, the opening two posts of my "high end washer/dryer" thread choked as one post (there were pics in the post) so I made it 2.

To the best of my recollection, I have NEVER had it on a "regular sized" post, or one without external links. I also have not personally noticed a difference between this happening using Quick Reply or the "regular" way to post a reply.




I also noticed a problem when including stuff with "smart quotes" that I might be copying over from Word or something, but I think that is unrelated to this issue.

Either way, it seems that the use of quotation marks and multiple external links (esp. to images) seems to be confusing the Forum.

I'm corresponding with one of the tech guys over at VB, going to have him check under the hood and see if there's anything he can do to help.

Odds are it's going to be a combination of:

1) Pruning posts from the forum (Creating a seperate archive)
2) Upgrading our processors (Appearently 2 servers running Dual Xenon's 2.5 Ghz w/ 4 Gigs of ram isn't enough to support a huge forum)
3) Tuning the hell out of apached/mysql/php

My suggestions:

Completely delete all non-archived threads older than a year.

Then remove as much javascript as possible from the forum. Start with getting rid of the drop-down forum menu. Get rid of the ads that depend on javascript.

Remove the drop downs only as a last resort. I use them a TON and the lack of them would be a killer for me as I'm not willing to bookmark all the forums I read here.

Wha?? Not the ads!!

He's getting serious about this!!!

(though I guess it was just for a minute or so, as it seems to be back on.

We support you, Geoff!

Clean up old posts if you have to.

Search is now disabled when load spikes.

I am cleaning a TON of old crap off the forum to make the db smaller:

Deleted Threads (for some reason the forum doesn't remove them from the DB)
Old Bargain Thread (who the heck needs to know about an 800.com sale anyways)
Exchange forum Posts over 1 year old (if you haven't swapped your stuff by now, it aint going to be swapped)
The Share The Love Forum (Amazon Killed it, so it was more than time for us to kill our posts)

More to come.

OK Spent most of the night tonight working with one of the guys from VB. Did a number of tweaks to the db and the way we do backups of the forum at night. So hopefully this will help the whole loading issues.

Also we may need to upgrade our DB server even more to support the growth of the forum. So bear with us, we might not be out of the woods here yet. But I do feel we've gotten some traction in dealing with the issues.

The sports forum probably would be another good place to clean up as well. There have been some huge threads posted there in the past. I'd start with deleting all the Lakers threads.

You're right! (rushes off to clear out all threads with keyword "Lakers")

whew! thank god the "Yankee Hater" threads are safe...

Glad I could help

Still slow. No change. Nothing has been done. Nothing is fixed. Still locking up.

Cool. eva2000 helped me some on my forums some time ago.

Geoff, in the last 30 minutes it became very bad.

If it helps at all, I was also enjoying a nice Stout and some pretzels during this time.

I think it was Kanye's fault..

Kanye doesn't care about our forum speed