Argumentum ad populum. Also, the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the President has nothing to do with some of the masturbatory circle jerks there are in the average Bush pitting.
I don’t think this means what you think it does as it is inappropriate in this situation.
If you say so.
OK, so they’re gone over the numbers, and whatever else they’re gonna do besides wondering where the Cubs are gonna finish this year.
How about some definitive information, Ed? Anyone? Bueller?
While the “Search” link is missing from the top of the page, I think the “Subscribe” link should be gone too.
Evidently you have not recently perused the MLB’s own message boards. By the standards of virtually all sports boards I have ever seen, you, sir, are a veritable Cicero. Here is a typical conversation on bluejays.com’s message board:
TARDBOY
on the radeo that mccown guy said the joys will finnish third what an ashole
JAYS4EVER69
yah he said frank thomas is old frank is only like 32 (Thomas is 40. - RJ) mccown is an a$$hole
ROY4EVER
roy is gonna win 30 games
TARDBOY
no hes not your stupid
Show me the way to SA. It sounds okay.
I just don’t see much room for the problem wtih be with vBulletin. Not only are there vBulletin-based boards of comparable or larger size w/o our performance issues, there were vBulletin-based boards fitting that description long enough ago that they would have been running version of vBulletin no newer than what we are running now. We don’t even make the first page, and I doubt all those others came from behind and overtook us since the era when our version of vBulletin was the newest and greatest.
vBulletin is just a web-based front end for speaking to a fairly standard SQL back end, isn’t it?
What do you suppose Jerry & co think is the cause of our performance problems?
Threads have been offloaded from the db a few times (to my annoyance & dismay), which at first glace would seem to imply that someone thinks the db was having problems either with overall file size or with sheer record count, but I think that is an erroneous assumption on our part, or else on theirs (more likely ours, I think).
I actually am a database geek. Not MySQL or postgreSQL or MS SQL or Oracle or any of the other big iron systems, just FileMaker. That’s enough to give me some thoughts & concerns though —
You could not run this board on FileMaker because it would be too slow and would not accomodate enough concurrent users. But you could sure as hell read the board in single-user mode with no problem’s due to db size. 10-20 gigs is not particularly huge for FileMaker. I would think that would certainly be true of the various SQL systems? Some SQL dbs are chock full of blobs (binary large objects, including movies and sounds and pictures and document files and whatnot). I’m pretty sure they get massively huge.
Nor should 8-million-someodd records be a problem. In FileMaker there’s a ludicrously huge maximum number of records. It gets unweildy at doing searches long before you get anywhere close to that, because FileMaker is slow. So again, I have a hard time believing a SQL type db system would be choking due to the number of records that our board is comprised of.
So, yeah, I’m very curious about WHAT, exactly, is the bottleneck?
My WORRY is that it has something to do with a corruption. THAT I could believe would slow searching to a crawl; would cause a db administrator to think offloading a batch of the oldest records was worth a try (if it’s a long-term problem they’ve known about for years but can’t root out & fix, perhaps it is in the oldest records, somewhere).
I don’t know a lot about SQL db’s and what within them is subject to corruption. Generically speaking, databases consist of the raw data + the structure. Could the structure be corrupted? The table structure of the board doesn’t look awesomely complicated. Users, Forums, Threads, Posts. Perhaps a Status table attached to Users. Perhaps a few other ancillary tables. Seems like if the structure were corrupted, it wouldn’t be horrendously awful to rebuilt it and then import the data.
How about the data itself? Is is possible, and likely, that the data in the Posts table or the Threads table somehow contains batches of mangled stuff that impinges on the performance of the system? And that it’s hard to isolate and weed out? As I said, I could see a db admin exporting and then deleting a batch of old records if this is what they were thinking, and were hoping the corruption was in those older records.
I alluded to this above. I think this board is regularly under attack.
Here’s an analogous scenario: Client M runs a Wordpress blog hosted on a server farm out in Scottsdale, AZ along with a hundred other businesses, blogs and whatever. Client M’s blog is attacked – the database is appended with “new posts” until it exceeds its throttle rate and/or the servers (one for the site and one for the DB) grind to a halt. Additionally, five 2MB PDFs were downloaded again and again until Client M’s monthly allotment of bandwidth was achieved and the account was suspended. Client M’s perceived choice was to either immediately buy more bandwidth to get the account running again, or upgrade and migrate. Client M chose to suspend the site and hire a professional.
In the case of the SDMB, based on their suspension of the Search function I think our friends in Admin are getting good and proper counsel.
There are people out there with hardons for this site. Why would the Admin want to spill its guts and give the tards a roadmap? Can anyone on high be blamed for reticence or even perceived reticence?
And finally (not directed at you AHunter3), last night I wanted to find a stale competition thread in the Game Room. Oh no I had to change my month view and manually Ctrl+F on the word “shoot.” I had to load three pages to get to the right thread! Boy what a hardship.
I seem to recall that this was due to a well-known issue in vBulletin.
You may be on to something. There are a few people who have been banned from here with serious hard ons for this place who are also very motivated. On the other hand, Something Awful has pissed off legions of people, has way more traffic and active members and reportedly has very few outage problems.
I think it’s probably the combination of attacks and running software that is two years out of date. Imagine how much crap your computer would accumulate running a two year old version of IE.
EVERY message board is regularly under attack. I get a cross-site scripting attack on my site every 30 seconds or so; most originating from Russia and the Ukraine.
The registration process on my board is pretty secure against spambots, but one still tries to register every 15 minutes or so. On the SDMB, spambots are also rampant; there’s no CAPTCHA (even it it were implemented, it’s still weak on vBulletin 3.0), so they can register with impunity. The SDMB might have tightened up security in the past couple of days, though. Check out some of the former new users, and tell me how many are really legit: visit http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/member.php?u=74999 and manually change the last number to work your way back through recent registrants. Up until a few days ago, there was a lot of user names that were just random strings of letters, or obvious spammy names. Here’s a selection:
otzivgart
okmobzfuty
Izobvhit
satoridt
Dxwlxqvg
Sjynfzoy
Speaking strictly as a poster, I’m guessing it’s a combination of the size of the database, software (vBulletin and SQL) not being kept at the latest versions, and the server configuration. I think the problem is one of competing resources – even though serving up posts through a web server is pretty resource light, searching the database takes a relatively large amount of memory. You get enough searches happening at once and suddenly the web server doesn’t have enough memory and the whole thing grinds to a halt.
I think the solution is to set up a clustered server, where you put all the database searches on a separate machine (with tons of memory) so that when it gets hit hard the web server doesn’t bog down with it. Especially if you separated out the database into everything older than e.g. two weeks and recent stuff, so that searches on all the old stuff hit a different database than the one people are posting on, I’d imagine that would make a big difference, performance wise. I believe that’s how huge sites like Something Awful are set up – they have separate servers for search as well as for older stuff, which is archived.
The thing is, setting up a clustered web server with a distributed database like that is not exactly trivial, as I understand it. Just because there are tech people out there willing to do it for free as part of running a message board doesn’t mean that it’s a reasonable expectation that anyone running a message board can easily create such a setup on the cheap. I do think the problem is far beyond simply buying a standalone server with more memory and a faster cpu, as some have suggested.
Nope. If it’s an issue, it certainly isn’t a well known one. It’s easy to dismiss that theory as there are so many much larger sites running vBulletin without issue.
The funny thing is I draw my single greatest experience from watching some persistent vandals at the other board. For a while it was down all the time because of what appeared to be a lone attacker. They’re bored, retarded wastrels who fap away all that skill and stubbornness on a stupid little vendetta. It’s sad, man. And that’s just one angle.
I’m sure SA is running something a bit more substantial. The Sony MB I belong to is “mirrored” and cached. Anything that robust is generally quite expensive.
10-20GB is absolutely nothing. The Oracle DB I admin is currently at 7 terrabyte and growing over 100GB/month and there are much much larger databases out there.
However you can’t really estimate database performance from size, as you proberly know, you can easily create really bad code against a small database too.
As we can see from other boards, it’s entirely possible to run a combination of vbulletin and mysql on boards larger than this.
elmwood, I’m just curious, what is the aim of these spambots registering on a messageboard? What’s in it for them?
Posting spam, of course. If they make it through the registration procedure, they’ll post links to websites or whatever else.
Well, usually they post a bunch of links to porn or product sites just like spam email.
I doubt this place is under more serious attack than any of the other comparably sized boards and thinking the search function is being used in any attacks is a little silly, especially recently. How much damage is someone going to do having to pay $15 per bot and waiting 2 minutes between searches?
Well, as a result of all this, I’ve decided I’m just not going to renew again this next time. Without the ability to do a search for “new posts”, the board’s basically useless to me- I just don’t have the time to go through all of the forums, looking for new threads and posts.
On the plus side, I’m getting a lot more work done here at the office.