DescentBB

considering this forum is running on software that has to be at least 5 years old i wouldnt expect a fix for that anytime soon. it happens to me often, too

From all signs, this board has a huge search-index table which gets updated/queried for every post/edit. If it takes too long, the process times out.

We periodically have to get an admin to get things cleaned up, which apparently causes loss of some of the oldest posts.

That explains why some of the posting problems here seem to happen in cycles.

Foil wrote:this board has a huge search-index table

You mean as in the "search" tool at the top of the page that hardly works right? So if we disabled the indexing, allowing users to use Advanced Google search instead, we wouldn't even have this problem?

Isaac wrote:

Foil wrote:this board has a huge search-index table

You mean as in the "search" tool at the top of the page that hardly works right?

*I* think so.

Disclaimer: That's just my inference, based on what I'm seeing in the error message, and based on the cyclic (fixed, then gets worse, fixed again, gets worse again) nature of the problem.

Do we know what would fix this and the other glitches more permanently? phpBB 3.x? A LAMP stack? Surely there are larger phpBB's than us out there that have gotten past this? The \"wait for the DBB admin to notice that it's broken again and apply his kludge\" approach becomes a bit more frustrating each time the DBB breaks.

No one get mad at me for not editing... I'm giving up at this point. I'll just add new posts right after my last one.

An upgrade to the latest version would fix it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The only person with the ability to upgrade the forum software or correct the current issue (console level access) is currently M.I.A.

Krom wrote:The only person with the ability to upgrade the forum software or correct the current issue (console level access) is currently M.I.A.

epic

Mike still kinda hovers around us, I think.

Have we considered giving a second person the reigns? The DBB is surely full of enough qualified and trustworthy people with the adequate free time.

i showed the forum to a tech-savvy friend of mine who knows phpbb and he indicated that the problem was not the old software as much as it is the software being improperly configured

This doesn't happen to me much. Sounds like the server computer is racist against your client computer. :P

I think the reason we haven't upgraded is because there are to many \"hacks' in this version that would take forever to get working on a new version. I say, forget the old and bring in the new.

edit(I received some weird error when I posted this the first time).

Time for upgrade.

Yeah, like the custom theme and the litle bit at the bottom where it says \"Material Defenders\" instead of \"members.\"

Those modifications are simple and microscopic edits to the boards language files which are largely independent of the core functionality. This forum can be upgraded. The most difficult part of the process would probably be working the server configuration, IIRC at present the DBB has a separate database server and two load balanced / redundant front end servers.

Krom wrote:Those modifications are simple and microscopic edits to the boards language files which are largely independent of the core functionality. This forum can be upgraded. The most difficult part of the process would probably be working the server configuration, IIRC at present the DBB has a separate database server and two load balanced / redundant front end servers.

Oh, I know. I just imagine they are "reasons" for not upgrading.

Krom, those things seem like premature optimizations. The DBB doesn't get *that* much traffic. The glitchy software is the performance bottleneck at this point. Why not leave load balancing the servers as the icing on the cake?

null0010 wrote:i showed the forum to a tech-savvy friend of mine who knows phpbb and he indicated that the problem was not the old software as much as it is the software being improperly configured

IIRC, this is also being hosted on a WIMP (Windows/IIS/MSSQL/PHP) stack, which used to be a second-class platform for php. I'm not sure if this is still the case, as I have no personal interest in that particular stack.

Jeff250 wrote:The glitchy software is the performance bottleneck at this point.

Hm, I think the problem is more that over the years, the database has overgrown. Thus the periodic slowdowns when the index table (referenced in the error) grows too large.

Jeff250 wrote:WIMP (Windows/IIS/MSSQL/PHP) stack

Correct: 404.html

Yes it is overkill, the DBB could probably run smoothly on a Pentium II CPU system given the right stack.

AFAIK the slowdown is a problem with how phpbb 2.x handles searches and either some compatibility or corruption problem with the stack or more likely the database. It wouldn't be an issue in an upgrade because phpbb3.x can use SQL native search and doesn't use or maintain a search table like 2.x does. All the other mods and hacks are mostly cosmetic.

Foil wrote:Hm, I think the problem is more that over the years, the database has overgrown. Thus the periodic slowdowns when the index table (referenced in the error) grows too large.

Somewhere, someone is doing something wrong. Databases when used right scale very well.