......  to the SMF 2.1 support board.  You're probably here  ............  remember, when you post here, that we are trying to help you - as quickly as possible. Don't get  ............  problem.  Avoid bothering with your pride. We know just as well as anyone else that everyone makes  ............  still help you work it out. We don't expect you to be an expert at using our software - that would  ............ . Read before you post: This means you first need to check the wiki, and also search the SMF support  ............  to see if your question has not already been asked  ............  answered. If you decide that the answer to your problem is neither in the wiki nor in the  ............  asking questions:  Informative subject: Make your topic's title as informative and clear as possible.  ............ , ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, or strings of !!!!! will get you nowhere and it will not help people who  ............ . List of specifications: You should try to give as much information about your installation  ............ , and PHP version. You could also provide a link to a phpinfo.php page, as it would really help team  ............  and the support helpers. Link: Providing a link to your forum will probably give the support team a  ............  result in faster help. (If the forum is locked to public or the problem cannot be seen as a guest,  ............ 'll need to create a test account for support team members to  ............  the following details:  A descriptive subject to your topic. "Help" (or similar) is really not  ............  Which version of SMF you're using A link to your forum Any errors from your error log that  ............  description of the problem  2. Do not bump your topics within twenty-four hours of posting.  ............  of the world and may be in a different time zone to you. Members will help when they can.  3. Do not  ............  more than one topic about the same problem. Duplicate topics will  ............ . When you do post about your problem, please try to post it in the appropriate section. This just  ............ , and help you more efficiently with people who know more about the problems you're encountering.  If  ............  with converting from another forum, or you want to know if a converter is planned for the forum  ............  SMF 2.1.x   Further Tips and Advice:  If you're getting database or MySQL errors, you should look at  ............  as it may help you solve the issue without having to post at all. If this doesn't help, or you're not  ............  what it means, feel free to post about it here.  If you need help installing  ............  if you still have problems, please don't hesitate to ask.  If you're getting any kind of error message, ............  idea. Sometimes, though, you may come across a topic that had the same message... but is caused by  ............  different issue. Remember, don't get tied to that necessarily being the problem, and  ............ .  But searching almost always helps, so don't forget to do so... it'll save you and us time, and get  ............  messaging or emailing members of the support team for help, except in the cases of security related  ............  passwords are involved. You will almost always get a faster response if you post in public so you  ............  who can help you.  Thanks - and we hope only to help! Simple Machines Team     TL;DR -- - Use a  ............  version, mySQL/MariaDB version. - Provide a link to your forum (and a page demonstrating the issue,  ............  it is visible). - Don't PM the team/helpers without them asking you to do so.  ......

......  twenty-four improvements that you should be able to make to SMF regardless of your host, though only  ............  should provide you with shell access, access to crontab, php5 and InnoDB. An inability to do  ............  mine, but I did tweak some of them. I give credit to other places in the form of a link - I wanted  ............  in one place for people to easily reference, as opposed to being forced to  ............  the overwhelming majority of what you would want to do without significantly altering the schema ( ............  needs to die a slow, horrible death), smf's code (as does  ............  @ operator), or your server configuration. A lot can be  ............  probably best dealt with by pressuring the SMF team directly, while the last deserves a far more  ............  additional comments or optimizations, feel free to mention them. If appropriate I will edit them in  ............  impact.  1: Move your uploaded avatars directory. In the administration panel, go to Attachments  ............  Avatars, and then go to Avatar Settings.   For Upload avatars to...  ............ : Specific directory... For Upload directory: put in the raw,  ............  accessible server directory you want them added to ie /var/www/yoursite/ ............  URL. Don't do what I did and make it a subdirectory of your main avatars directory, SMF still  ............  it like an attachment directory for some reason so if someone uploads a .png  ............ , someone else decides to use it and the first person replaces it with a . ............  and its theme. In addition, two additional calls to the database are made to load the avatar itself,  ............  to increment the view counter. So not only are you  ............  php calls and dozens of database queries getting made.  After you do this access index.php? ............ =manageattachments;sa=moveAvatars to use the hidden feature to move your avatars over.  ............  RDNS is having issues or goes down, you are going to hear about the lag from your members.  Note (May  ............  my /etc/resolv.conf file. This causes the timeout to be 1 second, rather than 5 as per default. A  ............  can add this yourself. Your host should be able to make this adjustment, if not. [/color]  3: Enable  ............  webserver compresses the type of data you use to serve your webpages, you should specifically  ............ , as the webserver can better handle it.  4: Tune topics, members, and posts per page. In Posts and  ............  -> Topic Settings. Setting this low can have a  ............  more, they make more requests, after all, and get more frustrated. I use fifty topics per page and  ............ -five posts per page, which seems to be close to ideal. Disabling participation icons  ............  one of my 'culprit queries' and I've been forced to disable them for now. To be specific, you can  ............  this off in Admin -> Forums -> Posts and Topics -> Topic Settings  5: If you are going to  ............ , and are not or cannot use Sphinx, use a Large Custom Index. SMF's custom index works by taking a hash  ............ , and then building an index of which words point to which messages. 'Small' means this is a 16 bit  ............  words per post you have - which is not going to be a significant increase. The speed improvement  ............  get for the additional ~40% space usage is well worth  ............  the query is rather slow, but it is not difficult to have a self policing forum.  7: Disable the  ............  board index. Let people click a link if they want to see more than the last post they have access to,  ............  your Theme's settings, Number of recent posts to display on board index: - set to zero.  8: Run  ............  for inactive users script periodically. The log_topics, log_boards, and log_mark_read tables are not  ............ .  9: Do you really need that many boards? I tend to see this rather often and the answer is almost  ............  no. Too many boards actually reduces your forum's  ............  on each and every thread load - there are ways to make it more efficient but in general it's not an  ............  Ben has a post about disabling features according to server load here. - in the GUI for SMF 2.0 RC2  ............  enable this on a shared server or VPS unless you know what you are doing or at least have some guidance, ............ -driven sessions and offloading all attachments to Mediawiki. There is an awesome MediaWiki  ............ . It is likely more difficult for your members to use, however.  Addition #1 (March 5th): Prune  ............  notable if you follow tip #8. A simple way to do this is to make one postcount group have zero  ............ , another at one post, go to members -> search for members, sort by user ID ( ............ ), check and start purging until you get to the last month or whatever is comfortable. You  ............  go to Features & Options -> Layout and Options, set  ............  per page to 100 to make it faster (just don't go overboard  ............  the volume becomes so great that your server stops to send out thousands of emails.  The tasks can  ............  (but still reasonably active) forum, you may want to spread them out by an hour or so - remember it's  ............  enough for php to fire off emails to your mailserver, your  ............  threads This is one of those things that ought to be a setting - even vBulletin is known for  ............  threads, look up rpg.net's motivational poster history. Large threads mean there is a large result set  ............  further instructions in the query to prune from, and if a thread is too  ............  disks, two cores, and 4gb of RAM. You may want to cap thread length closer to 1k posts.   This also  ............  -> General, the online time threshold defaults to 15 minutes, as in vBulletin. Some people like to  ............  this rather high to give the illusion of an extremely active forum,  ............  people are already wising to this. In addition, you get diminishing returns,  ............  active table. It is also quite annoying - I had to modify the Users Online Today mod, simply because  ............  tuned, CPU intensive forums - you do not need to do this to have a solid-performing forum.  It is  ............  it becomes an issue and like most of us, you want to keep it, be sure to convert the underlying table ( ............ ) to InnoDB as described below.   Intermediate  ............   These steps are going to require some support from your host, or for you  ............  off of a VPS or dedicated hosting solution. The total improvement in speed can be extremely dramatic, ............  course, and pretty much any shared host you ought to be doing business with.   1: Converting Tables to  ............  the above you are still having issues, it's time to get a VPS or at least a better host. Make sure  ............  is sufficient 8M is only going to work for a tiny forum. 64M will do you fine up to  ............  levels, but if you have a lot of members and topics you may find that you need more, though you  ............  clearly pushing "Needs a VPS" territory at that point.  First, clear out your error  ............  a backup of your database.  You may also want to wipe out the read message indicators if you don't  ............  your forum to be unresponsive for too long when you do some of  ............ :  Code Select Expand DELETE FROM smf_log_topics; DELETE FROM smf_log_boards; DELETE FROM  ............ ;  This removes all message read indicators. It will annoy your users. You'll want to weigh  ............  forum. If you don't do this these three are going to take their sweet sweet time.  Code Select Expand  ............  smf_log_online ENGINE=InnoDB; ALTER TABLE smf_log_topics ENGINE=InnoDB; ALTER TABLE smf_members ENGINE= ............  TABLE smf_settings ENGINE=InnoDB; ALTER TABLE smf_topics ENGINE=InnoDB; ALTER TABLE smf_log_activity  ............  are next.  You will also want flood control to be memory/heap:  Code Select Expand DROP TABLE  ............  with a lot of personal messages this is going to take awhile. So warn people, etc. etc.  Code  ............  2.0 has a few additional tables that you may wish to convert to InnoDB:  Code Select Expand ALTER  ............  converting -all- tables except floodcontrol to InnoDB. For most tables this is perfectly  ............  and smf_messages, as well as similar "Post and forget" tables like a Shoutbox, this can actually be  ............  to performance, particularly with a good-sized  ............  currently depends on MyISAM's ordering in order to display boards properly - if you convert it to  ............  you will want to make adjustments to the key and/or SMF  ............  your host does not at least give you the option, get a new host.  3: If possible, keep SMF in its own  ............  all on the same physical server, it's a good idea to give each such application and even every - ............ , set Optimize tables every how many days to 0 to disable it.   B: Make two subdirectories  ............  your home directory. Call one 'backups' and the other 'scripts',  ............ . chmod o-rx the both of them.  C: We're going to want to let your members know that your forum is  ............  backed up, because once you get into the million post range this is going to  ............  down for awhile. Make a file in the scripts directory called Settings.lock.php - obviously, you're  ............  to want to customize this appropriately.   SMF 2.0  ............  They decided to move theme loading, etc. before Settings.php. So  ............  than this, you just have to swap out index.php : / Annoying.  Code Select  ............ ';  D: Let's make a script in your scripts directory. Call it backup.smf and be sure to chmod 700 it. ............  You are certainly going to have to edit the directories, database names, and  ............ . Use whereis mysqlcheck/mysqldump/nice/bzip2 to make sure the directories calling them are  ............ . You may also wish to remove --auto-repair from the mysqlcheck line,  ............ +%a`.sql /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/mysqlcheck -ao -–auto-repair -u dbusername -p"dbpassword" --databases  ............  it because it's not the only aspect of the site) to make a backup via mysqldump. If you are not using  ............  custom search index (Sphinx or search is just disabled)  ............  (god why...) etc. The weekly log rotation seems to be a good compromise between space and having  ............  than one backup to try and recover from IMO. 5: Optimizes our  ............ 't want any random chance of someone breaking into an account and reading it. 7: Since we've got our  ............  backed up, we can freely restore our original Settings.php before we compress  ............  backup we just made. Do not pipe mysqldump to bzip2. You will end up taking your forum down for  ............  longer than it needs to be unless you have a tiny forum.  E: run crontab - ............  /home/userdir/scripts/backup.smf  Change the directory and time as needed. This runs the backup at 4: ............  amount of activity.  F: I use a WinSCP script to synchronize these with my machine at 5 AM each  ............  system.  Additional Item #1 (March 7th): Get rid of Text tables. - note, this is included in  ............  sorts, joins and other operations, MySQL needs to create a temporary table. MySQL usually tries to  ............  a tiny key buffer.  Converting TINYTEXT columns to VARCHAR(255) is fairly safe.   The following is  ............ `name` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;  ALTER TABLE `smf_custom_fields` CHANGE `field_desc` `field_desc` VARCHAR( ............ ) NOT NULL; ALTER TABLE `smf_custom_fields` CHANGE `field_options` `field_options`  ............ (255) NOT NULL; ALTER TABLE `smf_custom_fields` CHANGE `mask` `mask` VARCHAR(255) NOT  ............ ; ALTER TABLE `smf_custom_fields` CHANGE `default_value` `default_value`  ............  prevent posting on a large forum. Each operation took nearly a minute for my forums:  Code Select  ............ ` `modified_name` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;  Thanks to Keeper for converting this mess to SMF 1.1:  Code  ............ ` `subject` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;  You may want to file down your board descriptions so they can fit  ............ ` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;  If you don't care to do that, see the following.  Some TEXT columns  ............  also be set to VARCHAR safely. This is, however, slightly  ............  involved, so if you're squeamish feel free to skip this step.  Code Select Expand ALTER TABLE ` ............  messages, shoutbox messages, and messages tables to InnoDB. This was a mistake. I've kept the  ............  through .htaccess. Note that your provider needs to have mod expires on in order for this to function. ............  SMF goes from winning the horserace by about 20% to losing by about 25%. The culprit here is eval () - ............  in order to assist coders in modifying their templates, SMF  ............  evals the template to make sure everything is okay.  If you're at the  ............  where you are using a VPS or dedicated server to host your site, however, you should be keen  ............  to be using a test template before pushing it live.  ............  the following code:  Code Select Expand REPLACE INTO smf_settings  (variable, value) VALUES (' ............ ', '1');  And you're back up to speed : ) ......