Brandi
04-29-2008, 02:19 PM
OK, let me first start off with the bad news. Gifts AND points are gone. :sigh I dreaded having to do it b/c I know how much everyone loves them and worked your little butts off for the points, but hopefully you'll understand (at least a little bit) when I tell you the good news.
After MONTHS of trying to figure out what in the heck was wrong with our server and why people were constantly getting errors, time outs and even being blocked from both sites, my server management team and I basically narrowed it down to the points and gifts modification.
Last night, we spent hours troubleshooting, tweaking, disabling things then enabling them again to see what the problem was. Finally, after completely uninstalling the entire modification today, all of our problems seemed to be instantly gone.
The main problem is that the modification is a free one that was written a couple years ago for a older version of vbulletin. There have been several new releases of vbulletin since the modification was written, so of course the code has changed a lot and there were certain instances that were conflicting.
I knew that we may encounter some problems by me keeping it installed but, honestly, I just didn't want everyone to lose their cool gifts and points and such. So, I kept it installed despite knowing how many problems could occur.
Last night we pinpointed what the problem was. Something within that modification (some of the conflicting code somewhere) was causing each person who is logged in to essentially open SEVERAL new connections to the server, instead of the typical one connection per user. So, instead of having 300 connections when 300 people were logged in, the code was hanging somewhere and spawning up to 100-200 connections PER USER.
I am with one of the BEST server management companies out there and not even their best server could handle such a load, which is why our server was completely locking up and shutting down. Additionally, the server even was blocking certain IP's b/c this type of behavior looks malicious when you have one IP spawing 100 times within one page view. :nutts
So, anyway, the short of it is that the code is now completely removed from our server and doing so reduced the server load drastically.
Whether we will have a new points and gifts system or not will basically be determined after the one I've been waiting on comes out and the author can better explain whether it's suited for a large and busy board like this one.
Until then, I'll just be keeping an eye on things and we still have a few smaller tweaks we're going to make in hopes that we can get the forums to speed up even a bit more.
What I need from you is to let me know if you receive any database errors or server errors (time out's, not found, etc) so I can make sure that the points system is the only culprit of the issues we've been having. If not, I'll need to go back through all of the code and possibly do a clean install of vbulletin to get rid of any remaining, lingering issues.
Again, you have no idea how much your patience and understanding is appreciated. Rest assured, I am and will do everything possible to keep the forums running smoothly and quickly for everyone :hugs
After MONTHS of trying to figure out what in the heck was wrong with our server and why people were constantly getting errors, time outs and even being blocked from both sites, my server management team and I basically narrowed it down to the points and gifts modification.
Last night, we spent hours troubleshooting, tweaking, disabling things then enabling them again to see what the problem was. Finally, after completely uninstalling the entire modification today, all of our problems seemed to be instantly gone.
The main problem is that the modification is a free one that was written a couple years ago for a older version of vbulletin. There have been several new releases of vbulletin since the modification was written, so of course the code has changed a lot and there were certain instances that were conflicting.
I knew that we may encounter some problems by me keeping it installed but, honestly, I just didn't want everyone to lose their cool gifts and points and such. So, I kept it installed despite knowing how many problems could occur.
Last night we pinpointed what the problem was. Something within that modification (some of the conflicting code somewhere) was causing each person who is logged in to essentially open SEVERAL new connections to the server, instead of the typical one connection per user. So, instead of having 300 connections when 300 people were logged in, the code was hanging somewhere and spawning up to 100-200 connections PER USER.
I am with one of the BEST server management companies out there and not even their best server could handle such a load, which is why our server was completely locking up and shutting down. Additionally, the server even was blocking certain IP's b/c this type of behavior looks malicious when you have one IP spawing 100 times within one page view. :nutts
So, anyway, the short of it is that the code is now completely removed from our server and doing so reduced the server load drastically.
Whether we will have a new points and gifts system or not will basically be determined after the one I've been waiting on comes out and the author can better explain whether it's suited for a large and busy board like this one.
Until then, I'll just be keeping an eye on things and we still have a few smaller tweaks we're going to make in hopes that we can get the forums to speed up even a bit more.
What I need from you is to let me know if you receive any database errors or server errors (time out's, not found, etc) so I can make sure that the points system is the only culprit of the issues we've been having. If not, I'll need to go back through all of the code and possibly do a clean install of vbulletin to get rid of any remaining, lingering issues.
Again, you have no idea how much your patience and understanding is appreciated. Rest assured, I am and will do everything possible to keep the forums running smoothly and quickly for everyone :hugs