UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? What is the max users UBBThreads can handle ?

Just wondered who has had the most amount of users, sorry I mean maximum amount of online users, running at any one time on UBBThreads ? Could it handle 1000, 10,000 ? Does it just depends on the box spec / mysql query limits ? I guess the who's online screen would have to be restricted in numbers when into 100s !

Since no one else has answered this ....

As far as I know, UBB.threads has no specific limit, so it would depend on the "box specs". A user is really only "online" while the server is processing and responding to the HTTP request, so the faster the server handles requests, the fewer the number of users that are actually "online" at the same time. The who's online info is not real-time, but shows the history over the last 10 minutes.

Since .threads uses MySQL for data storage it's ability to grow is only limited by this and the hardware that it runs on.

Here is some data on MySQL.

Scalability and Limits:
Handles large databases. We are using MySQL Server with some databases that contain 50 million records and we know of users that use MySQL Server with 60,000 tables and about 5,000,000,000 rows.


I have seen a .threads site that had over 170 users listed in the "Who's Online" page. For the life of me I can't remember what site that was. I offered to help someone and they gave me their URL and I can't even remember if I actually was of any help either... lol

Having plenty of RAM and fast drives such as the SCSI types will improve performance as far as hardware goes. Fine tuning MySQL and having PHP compiled into the web server helps also.

Yahoo! recently decided to go with PHP for their own uses and I believe that also included MySQL as well. (this in itself says alot to me as far as the potential of .threads)

Lisa_P's forum FishingForDeals.com routinely has 200 registered and 200 anon users online at the same time.

Just looked at her main index page.. it says maximum online was 534.

Go Lisa!

I knew she had a high traffic site. And that's only on one machine and not using a dedicated database server on the backend. (or it was the last time she gave some details about the site)

I would venture to say that her site is *the* largest .threads site in use with the stratics site next in line.

I think Xena Dragons site over at Stratics has the most online users at any givin time. They use server clusters to handle the load as far as I know.... http://boards.stratics.com is the site

My site has had upto 183 users online (on the bulletin boards that is) at once. We only have one box that handles our whole site, as well as a couple other sites we host, and I'm pretty sure we could handle about 500 users with this box without too much difficulty. We recently turned off new post tracking on the main index with created WAYYYY too much load when you have that many people. We're coming up on almost 900,000 rows in our posts database with 17,428 registered users.

This is fantastic news guys - and thanks for all the excellent & useful information - kind of guessed that a very well-written product such as this could handle it !

Right, now i've just got to find some cash to buy a better box!!!

If only I worked with people like you lot in the UK - I'd get so much more done! They couldnt even see the benefit of having a discussion forum (we are a global company with offices in 7 major countries) - I'm still pushing them but I need to do write a hefty document first! Even then I reckon they will knock the idea on the head because they just wont spend (invest) any money - crazy people - its peanuts to them anyway!

Anyone got a useful fact sheet / features sheet I could use to dangle infront of their noses ?!

[]Go Lisa![/]

Thanks!

Dave was right, we aren't using a dedicated server. The server we are using is only shared by a couple sites though, so it's not a typical shared server either.

The board really started dragging a couple weeks ago (it's a shopping site so Christmas means more traffic). We had about 1/2 of the threads archived on non-visible boards, but I had to completely move them to another table. I moved about 400,000 threads, leaving about 300,000 on the regular board, and the speed is much better now.

Moved 400,000 threads? WOW! That's gotta be a long weekend.
How did you move them? I want to make an automatic archive thingie that does this exact same thing. (somewhere down the road) lol

Wow.

My users have suggested an archive to speed thing up.

I don't have anywhere near that number of old posts.. but I can see the need in the future.

I'm sure Dave will make a Kick ass mod by the time I need it.

It really only took a few hours. First, we already had the posts we were moving seperated, since they were in invisible boards. I set up a board on a seperate mysql database, so that the regular board is on a different database than the archives. Instead of running the createtables.php script, I used mysqlhotcopy and just copied the entire regular board to the new archive board. I renamed all of the tables with the prefix "archive_". Then I just deleted all of the forums that weren't "archive":

DELETE FROM 'archive_w3t_Posts' WHERE 'B_Board' NOT LIKE 'archive%'

DELETE FROM 'archive_w3t_Boards' WHERE 'B_Board' NOT LIKE 'archive%'

DELETE FROM 'archive_w3t_Messages' (deletes all of them, since we don't need them)

DELETE FROM 'archive_w3t_Online' (deletes all because not needed)

I manually deleted the categories that were no longer needed because there weren't that many (maybe 15?).

The worst part was running altertable scripts on everything because our main board is still on 6.0.2 and the archive is set up with 6.1.1.

Setting up the board, running the altertables, copying the database, and deleting the stuff we didn't need anymore -- in all it took me about 12 hours from start to finish.

[] in all it took me about 12 hours from start to finish [/]
with loads of coffee and pizza on the side ????



Glad to hear that you have done it Lisa. I wish my board had such number of posts.... (reaching 8500 soon)

Warm regards

Nikos

I forsee my site getting large very quickly. we just hit our 100,000 post mark last week.. and right now, we're averaging around 1000 posts per day. All I know is I remember a few months ago when I read every single post on my site, and now, I take a few hours off and I'm already a few hundred posts behind, lol.

But I must say, our new dedicated (semi-dedicated really because I host a couple other small sites on it for a few people) handles the higher traffic effortlessly. On our shared server we encountered a lot of slow periods when it was busy, but now it trucks right on through

I'll chime in with a bit of advice for those with busy sites. A while back I was working with the folks at thedieselstop.com. They'd routintely get several hundred users online and at times it would start to slow down a bit. We found that making a few changes to some settings made a huge difference.

The main ones we changed were the number of posts displayed on the postlist screen and the showflat screens. By default they had these set to around 50 or so. These settings apply to all unregistered users and are the defaults for new users. Many times they had around 200 unregistered users. So, that's roughly 50*200 posts to process when they visit the postlist screen and showflat (depending on how many replies are in the thread). Obviously they probably aren't all viewing these screens at the same time but the potential to process ALOT of posts is there.

So, they bumped these numbers down, I think to somewhere around 20 or so. This made a big difference in itself. This doesn't effect the users that are logged in as they get to use their own personal settings for the number of posts displayed.

So, just note that these 2 settings can make a big difference on very active forums.

We just migrated from classic to threads and have seen a incredible speed difference. Classic was really chocking, during the day we had over 200 visitors with the Who's Online set at 30 minutes. We have it set at 10 minutes now and are getting maybe around 80.

One thing that is interesting is something that our webhost does, Dreamhost. The charge by these things called "conueries", and here is a little excerpt:

[]"Conueries" is a term we at DreamHost came up with to measure MySQL database usage. The word is a combination of "connections" and "queries", as that is what the unit is derived from! Basically, the number of MySQL queries you have in a month, plus 25 times the number of connections you have is your total "conueries" for a month!

Database connections use far more system resources than the average database query does. Because of this, we want to encourage people to make as few connections as possible with their code. So we "penalize" each connection by making it worth so many conueries. You can do a lot of things to cut down the number of connections you make with your code - it all depends on your particular application.

One of our customers averages over 1300 queries per connection! Thanks to the design of his code, his "conueries" are basically just queries.

Another customer averages just one query per connection. What they've done is basically turn their "conueries" into 25 times their queries. This uses up the monthly allotment of conueries a lot faster than necessary, so you should try to keep those connections open as long as possible. It'll also make your site faster in the process.
Remember, it's possible, through the use of peristant connections, to not have to make a new connection to your database even on a new page load!
[/]

If what is said above is true, then part of screams arguement is wrong. If you minimize the number of threads shown then people will be looking at more pages to see the thread, thus making another connection, assuming that .threads doesn't use persistant connections.

Of course this all depends on the box you are running. Good topic!

[]If what is said above is true, then part of screams arguement is wrong [/]
It isn't.
Doing an query that shows 20 resultsets is faster than a query that shows 200 resultsets.
So the execution time of the query and the php processing is faster with small queries.
The html page can be send earlier to the visitors browser.

You can test this easily. Simply turn the debugging information on and change your display preferences.

Astaran is correct. Having to display only 20 results *is* faster than having to wait for 200 results to return and display. Also, some users will find that when using persistant connections with a heavy userload that the connections will fail because the site is at the limit of concurrent connections to the database. Running without persistant connections helps in that once a user gets the information they wanted their connection is closed and available for another user to use.

I said if the above is true then he is partially wrong, I'm saying he is wrong or I think he is wrong. Don't get bent out of shape. Doing a query for 20 recordset is faster then doing one for 200,000. I guess I need to clarify.

Ok if what I got off of Dreamhosts site is true, where connections are 25x more demanding then a query, then wouldn't it be preferable to have your default number at something like 40 instead of 20? People would get twice as much information without having to make another connection, and this would theoretically be faster if you are not taking into consideration of things like peoples connection speed and such.

Of course if you have advertising you want to serve as many pages as possible, so you could set it to 5

Diminishing returns, Intensity.

You reach a point where it takes so long for a query to run, and so long to process it that you end up with things queued up behind it. The more you have in queue the higher the load on the server and then the longer things take to run, which makes the queue longer.

If you can get in and out of the database faster, proccess the information and get it to the user faster you're better off doing that then you are using longer running queries/insert/updates creating a waiting queue and/or holding tables locked longer. Especially in a high traffic high volume situation.

I'm wondering... if dreamhost would rather you not make continual new connections will they allow you to use the pconnect function? It would seem to get around thier issue of making new connections quite nicely and can be enabled right in the control panel.

Speaking as a web host I know I disagree with them. I don't want any long running connections. They queue, slow things down, and you run out of connections. I'd prefer you to get in, run the query and get out. The connection pool is limited, so the faster they move in and out the better..

Thanks Navaho, I guess that does really make sense now.

I'll show your response to Dreamhost and see what they have to say. It is likely our hosting costs might go up because of the switch from .classic to .threads, but I need to point out how much load we have taken off of their webserver.

I know this might be a little hard to calculate, but how do the loads of .classic compare to that of .threads, like how many users on one board would be equivalent to the other?

BTW what I'm doing to this thread, on my website is called creeping on someones thread. Sorry for the thread creep.

So Lisa are you using Yahoo groups as your web host? I saw that you use yahoo groups for you mailing list, but I could not determine if that was your host as well. If so how much is your plan if you don't mind me asking? I really need to move my site, but I can not afford a dedicated server. I am getting the " too many users are trying to access your site message" regularly. Could anyone offer me any suggestions? Beverly

No we just set up the Yahoo group so that if the server went down for some reason, we'd have a way of letting people know that wasn't dependent on the same server.

We are hosted through FutureQuest. Quality is excellent, uptime is fantastic, price is not cheap. We pay around $200 - $250 a month, depending on the traffic.

thanks lisa_p I really appreciate your response. I wish you continued success with your site.

Lisa is your site simular to the FatWallet.com site that was being sued by the likes of Walmart and others for disclosing sale prices? I know yor site is about shopping. I was just wondering if you had read any of the articles on the net about the case. Not that I think there is anything wrong with your site or even FatWallet's. Just wanted to give you a heads up on some corporate stupidity.

Related article:

Corporate heavies threaten Web sites with DCMA

Thank you Beverly

Dave, yes, our site is very similar to FatWallet (well, I'd say not so similar, but categorically speaking . . . ). Walmart sent an email to our site asking us to remove the posts and with the cooperation of our users we agreed to do it. It isn't something I personally believe was correct, but we don't have the money that Tim (FatWallet) has to fight it legally, and when I apply to take the Bar Exam it wouldn't look good if I was involved in a legal battle with Walmart. I had a professor for Arbitration and Mediation who is a senior corporate Attorney for Walmart, and knowing their 'legal strategies', it isn't worth the time and money at this point in time. It'd be nice if my Corporations Law exam tonight was on this stuff, and less on mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and Enron type stuff.

Wow they must be tracking down anyone and everything related to such sites on the net. That's insane.

Good luck on the exam!

Lisa this has got to be a record for threads...

Maximum Users Online was 585 on Tue Nov 19 2002 02:00 PM


I'm not aware of any other sites with this kind of use so I'll just say yours is #1... lol

No way, that can't be a record We've only got about 4500 users, and someone on here has like 70,000 or something.

I'm actually surprised that the max is still in November. With Christmas our site is getting much more traffic, bandwidth wise at least. Must just be the same users staying on longer and longer. We usually use between 50 and 60 gig of transfer each month, and I'd rather not go over the 60 and pay for every gig over. Unfortunately the traffic has caused our host to once again start pushing for us to switch to vB, which he insists is easier on the servers.

More thread creep. Sorry Lisa

The difference between the load .threads lays on a server and .threads is can be considerable depending on the size and scale of your board.

Threads is not flat file, there is considerably less I/O as compared to a .classic site of the same size and traffic. Sure, some of the queries that .classic does can get heavy (which by their description is thier preference) but in comparison to .classic's search or Recent Vistors it's not as much a problem.

This server hosts ubbdev and threadsdev. The traffic is probably relatively close to even though I haven't checked this lately. threadsdev is definately the easier of the two on the server.


I love .classic, I'm the Product Manager So don't take the above as me trying to beat down .classic. What I am trying to convey is that all things being equal your .threads board will be easier on a properly configured server than .classic. Especially as you scale up. It shouldn't cost MORE to run, it should cost less. Especially given that it's (.threads) all .css and thus each page is lighter. The only caveat is that your board just might get more popular. That'll cause it to use more resources

"Unfortunately the traffic has caused our host to once again start pushing for us to switch to vB, which he insists is easier on the servers. "

I want to see him prove it.

The number of registered users does not impress me at all.

The number of posts per day/week/month and the number of active users hanging around the community does.


In short, your site rocks!

[]What I am trying to convey[/] Your preaching to the choir here. I have no doubt that any difference between vb and threads would be minimal. I installed a copy of vb last year as a test board and so no real difference between it and my threads test board (granted, neither had traffic, but they did have the same data.) The host runs vb and I think they just really like vb. Either that or they really don't like Rick for some reason. (I don't think that's it. )

I have way too much work into threads to switch, not to mention I think vb looks cheesy. We'd look for another host (gulp) before switching.

check Xena Dragons boards.stratics.com they have [] 116605 Registered User(s). [/] as of right now and there were 154 unregistered users and 96 registered users online. Not bad for a gaming site at 2:20 in the afternoon...

Yeah I'm aware of the statics board. They are big for sure. If I recall correctly they are using two servers, one for the database and the other for the webserver. This does help a great deal on large sites. Lisa's site however seems to be able to deal on a shared server. That just seems to impress me. I think she stated what type of server and the specs somewhere... will have to look that up. This can give others an idea of what they should look for from their web hosts.