Forum is very slow - Working to ID a fix?

[chris]

Great feedback. If we were to upgrade the forum, we'd look at something that had great native mobile support.
Chris

[chris]

1st level of forum and system upgrades are completed. There will be more tomorrow. The system may not be available as I figure out how to upgrade to new versions of PHP and MySQL.

[chris]

One more upgrade completed. Two more to go. I'll keep you all posted, but the results so far are favorable. Please let me know what your experience is as well.

[sande005]

About 4 seconds after clicking on the link to the last page of this thread. 365ms of that was to get to 142.4.6.162, in the same range as other forums I belong to. So guessing still some latency on the server side.

Later addition: Odd - Chrome nagged me about whether I wanted to leave the page or not, and it did not look like the above posted. I shut down and restarted browser, home page came up as fast as any other. I clicked on "New Posts", it took 10 seconds to come up. Then I rechecked here, and see that the reply really had been posted.

[livinthelife]

Well, since yesterday's upgrade it was running great.

Now, it's slowed down again. And twice when I've logged on I've gotten a window saying "Invalid Redirect URL (http://www.mygrandrv.com/forum/forum.php)". But, when I go ahead and go somewhere on the forum, I'm logged in.

[Luv2Ski]

Sorry if this has been asked before. Is the server running in a virtual machine (VMware, Zen, etc.) or is its operating system running on "bare metal". If a VM, it may be getting starved by other VMs running on the same host. From what I hear, most web hosting providers use VMs.

[oldguy]

Well, since yesterday's upgrade it was running great.

Now, it's slowed down again. And twice when I've logged on I've gotten a window saying "Invalid Redirect URL (http://www.mygrandrv.com/forum/forum.php)". But, when I go ahead and go somewhere on the forum, I'm logged in.

Same thing happened to me this morning.

[kevinpo]

Chris,
All functions are running much faster this morning. You're doing great!

Regards,
Kevin

[sande005]

Chris - just feedback - as of this posting, about 15 sec. to get to "new posts", and then another 10 before the 3rd page of this thread came up. I spent too many years debugging this kind of stuff in a huge multi-user environment, so realize how frustrating and sometimes thankless it is. At least this is "recreational" and not something where you have many bosses calling you many times a day to remind you how "mission critical" things are. So even if it is something that can't be easily resolved due to money, time, or even just plain interest level - still thank you for putting in the work to host this site!

[chris]

Great feedback everyone. The experience seems mixed at this point. I am on a Virtual Private Server with 3 Xeons, 4GB, and dedicated drive space. I just put a SSL certificate on the server, switched it to https:, and upgraded to PHP 7.0. The upgrade to 7 reduced the CPU almost immediately. I need to migrate us from the original database format - MyISAM to INNODB which is more efficient. Then finally I'll migrate us to MySQL 5.7 which should finalize the upgrades. Then I'll start the tweaks for performance, and then lastly we'll examine looking at moving to a different platform soon.

I was hoping to move to the VBulletin 5 platform, but after 14 years, I am really evaluating new platforms. I expect this site to grow quite a bit over the next few years. Accordingly, I want to be sure that we're on a great platform. The guys that run the larger sites stay on VB3.8.X, or move to something different. I'd like to stop our performance hits that we've been experiencing so that we can migrate to a new platform on our schedule, not because of performance issues.

Keep using this thread to keep me posted on your experiences. Also let me know over PM if you'd like to be part of the group to evaluate the new software and let me know your thoughts.
Thank you,
Chris