# Something Wrong with VPSBoard



## sv01 (Jun 13, 2013)

Time to upgrade ?


There appears to be an error with the database.
If you are seeing this page, it means there was a problem communicating with our database. Sometimes this error is temporary and will go away when you refresh the page. Sometimes the error will need to be fixed by an administrator before the site will become accessible again.

You can try to refresh the page by clicking here


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## drmike (Jun 13, 2013)

Yeah, there were issues today with heavy traffic (spiders + malicious) and slowness from MySQL.  

@MannDude is on it now.  Just saw a huge increase in site responsiveness in the past 5 minutes (especially when submitting posts).


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## D. Strout (Jun 13, 2013)

I didn't see that error, but the site has been slow on and off. Glad to know it's being worked on, and the site does seem more responsive right now.


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## MannDude (Jun 13, 2013)

Yeah, was reported to me from another member earlier too. The site has been painfully slow all day.

DB is on BuyVM's hosted SQL service, though I may be upgrading/ordering a larger VM from them so I can keep everything under one roof or offloading it to it's own VM so it's not in a shared environment. Fran mentioned earlier there was an abuser on the MySQL node and he was kicked, and things are much better now.

Performance is now priority #1. This site has grown so much, we're approaching 10,000 posts and about 30-35% of traffic to the site is NEW visitors from Google and elsewhere. It pains me knowing that these visitors come here and are likely turned off due to the performance. But I'm hoping we'll get better MySQL performance if we take it away from the shared environment. We also get attacked quite often with DDoS as activity here continues to rise, as there are folks out there that do not wish to see vpsBoard to succeed, or are bored, or whatever.


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## Magiobiwan (Jun 13, 2013)

Chuck it behind a paid Cloudflare plan perhaps? Or get one of Ramnode's SSD VPSes so MySQL can be insanely fast?


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## wlanboy (Jun 13, 2013)

Sounds like a good plan. I always do separate webservers, databases and mailservers.


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## MannDude (Jun 13, 2013)

Magiobiwan said:


> Chuck it behind a paid Cloudflare plan perhaps? Or get one of Ramnode's SSD VPSes so MySQL can be insanely fast?


Was behind CloudFlare Pro, though it gets disabled / re-enabled off/on manually. 

I'll look at their plans but I expect best performance would be had when MySQL is in the same geographic location and on the same local network.


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## wlanboy (Jun 13, 2013)

MannDude said:


> I'll look at their plans but I expect best performance would be had when MySQL is in the same geographic location and on the same local network.


I totally agree. Same network and different node


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

For transparency sake, I've offered to buy vpsBoard another VPS in Vegas to offload the MySQL.


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

wlanboy said:


> I totally agree. Same network and different node


 

Same datacenter, with a high performance VPS.

But truth be told, the biggest slow down when offloading the database is the network overhead and time between the machines.  Offloading MySQL is just plain slow.  There are reasons to do that (ex: limited RAM VPS, centralized huge MySQL server, "security", etc.).  Most of the reasons aren't very good reasons.  If you have a central SAN/NAS or some heavy duty compliance/audit/security/etc. then isolating MySQL can happen to comply.  But it always diminishes performance in a big way.


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## vanarp (Jun 14, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Was behind CloudFlare Pro, though it gets disabled / re-enabled off/on manually.


 
Have you tried enabling CloudFlare's Rocket Loader? It might give some more performance boost.


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

The slowness with vpsBoard is almost solely two war factions:

1. Malicious traffic

2. Shared MySQL

If the site after resolving those continues to load slow, I'd like to hear about it.   I'll get a CDN in place for the images/static then 

@MannDude is also getting smacked pretty good by Google's spider too.


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## MannDude (Jun 14, 2013)

vanarp said:


> Have you tried enabling CloudFlare's Rocket Loader? It might give some more performance boost.


Just re-enabled it. Not all performance settings are selected because it was causing issues with the board before. Let me know how the site performs for you now and if you can tell a difference.



buffalooed said:


> The slowness with vpsBoard is almost solely two war factions:
> 
> 1. Malicious traffic
> 
> ...


A CDN that wasn't as glitchy as CloudFlare would help quite a bit too.


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

MannDude said:


> A CDN that wasn't as glitchy as CloudFlare would help quite a bit too.


 

MaxCDN I highly recommend.   $39 for 1TB good to use for a years time.  Setup is idiot proof and quick.

BTW: vpsBoard seems as fast and responsive as ever.  So something is going right


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## vanarp (Jun 14, 2013)

*@MannDude*, I do not find any performances problems today. It works like a charm!



buffalooed said:


> MaxCDN I highly recommend.   $39 for 1TB good to use for a years time.  Setup is idiot proof and quick.


+1 for MaxCDN. I find CDN.NET is interesting too. They have more pops and usage charges are based on location. They give $15 free credit too.

Unless there is a plugin to use CDN with IPB, it might require to edit multiple files to make use of it.


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

Here's a link to the tool/howto for IPB to work with MaxCDN 

http://support.netdna.com/pullzone/invision-power-board-cdn/


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## vanarp (Jun 14, 2013)

buffalooed said:


> Here's a link to the tool/howto for IPB to work with MaxCDN


 
Awesome! Wish WP too offers CDN support out of the box


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## titanicsaled (Jun 14, 2013)

It's so much better now. I'm from the UK and now it loads nearly instantly.

I'm interested to know what you did *@**MannDude*?


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## Reece-DM (Jun 14, 2013)

I've been seeing plenty of issues with slowness over past few weeks.

Lets hope it stops 

Is there need for external SQL? it's a pretty small database i don't see the need for it


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## Kenshin (Jun 14, 2013)

Loads much faster today, finally don't need to keep refreshing.

I don't see a CDN solving the main problem, which is the page loading rather than element loading (at least from my end). I've been getting all the unreachable/not loading errors since VPSBoard started.

Would it be too expensive to simply use Cloudflare to completely protect the site ($200/m?) competely + a dedicated server, or in a larger VPS/dedicated server that has DDOS protection? For LEB/LET I can see the lowend part of things, but VPSBoard doesn't need to be tied to the lowend spectrum at least when dealing with the traffic growth.

Sell some ads, get these paid for, the traffic should grow by itself to make up for the investment. It's a major put-off when visitors (like self) have problems moving around the forums.


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## wlanboy (Jun 14, 2013)

Sometimes the loading of pictures last quite long:




PNGs loading from cloudfare... looks like the CDN is part of the problem.


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## MannDude (Jun 14, 2013)

No idea if the dudes over BuyVM did something or if it's just the luck of the draw, but the site is performing much better today.


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## earl (Jun 14, 2013)

Yeah I agree.. vpsboad been great all day.


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## drmike (Jun 14, 2013)

Oh today has been better/best because the haters stopped pegging the site (I'll betcha) 

No really, it's because of the 10k post milestone.  The haters realize they can't stop the downhill snowball effect.  Next milestone is?

Bahahahahaha!


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## D. Strout (Jun 14, 2013)

buffalooed said:


> No really, it's because of the 10k post milestone.  The haters realize they can't stop the downhill snowball effect.  Next milestone is?


1000 members or bust!


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## MannDude (Jun 14, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> 1000 members or bust!


I'd rather the ones that are already here be more active. I'll be more excited at 50K posts. We're more than 20% there! Haha.


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## D. Strout (Jun 14, 2013)

MannDude said:


> I'd rather the ones that are already here be more active.


All forums with any activity usually have most of that activity generated by no more than 10% of the members. That's just the way it is.


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## Francisco (Jun 14, 2013)

The issue isn't all floods. The SQL that vpsboard has been using has been getting hosed lately by a few users. Alas, I'll need to upgrade the CPU's in the box later this month 

For now i've tuned down the caches and such to see if that helps. All I can figure is that mariaDB is spending a ton of time keeping track of everything.

For now it has been running w/o issue.

Francisco


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## Magiobiwan (Jun 15, 2013)

Might also be that CF is blocking some of the malicious traffic from even reaching the site. I remember once I had a Mediawiki install on my site, and I turned off CF for about an hour. INSTANTLY had spambots hitting it left and right. Turned CF back on, and with "I'm Under Attack" mode, the bots stopped. Ended up hosing the install though, since I didn't feel like removing about 1k spam user accounts and stuff.


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