SMF 15+ second load times

[Leemy]

The SMF on my site is taking 15+ seconds per pageload.  This is for many people across ISPs and location.  The other parts of my server (cPanel, a small Wordpress blog) load perfectly.


The server monitors services and restarts them if they fail.  I've been getting constant emails (every 5 minutes for each services so on average every 45 seconds!):


imap
pop
spamd
exim
cpsrvd
ftpd
httpd


failed.


I looked at my traffic/bandwidth and it's not more than usual or anything.  Any idea what could be happening?

[smp420]

Who is your host? Do you have errors in your error log. What version of SMF, and could you post a link to your site? Also take a look here http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=293441.0,

[Kill Em All]

Most likely this is not the problem, but check your DB for errors...

A link would be extremely helpful to as smp420 suggested.

[Leemy]

link is http://bhangrateamsforum.com/discuss/index.php

was getting some errors from bad mods... tell me if you see anything funny otherwise i am backing up files and db and moving to a clean rc3 tonight (i'm on rc2 now)

[Kill Em All]

Your site is semi big, thus you have a big database, it did take me about 15 seconds to load.

If you are on a shared host, you may want to look for more powerful options...

[Leemy]

I'm on the highest level VPS my host provides (1 gig RAM which is never used, 50 gig storage, etc). I also use caching. 

The site has run amazingly until recently when i got random "high cpu usage" alerts from the host. note that these were during times of not much activity. my site's activity is down from its peak in feb/march events, so this doesnt make any sense.  we went from 1/2 second load time to 15 seconds!

[Kill Em All]

Did your hosting company change anything?

[Leemy]

No they say no change on the node or the server.

Tracert is normal time - no timeout. And other services on my VPS are fine like i mentioned (wordpress is an example: http://bhangrateamsforum.com/blog)

[smp420]

I doubt this will make much of a difference but go to Administration Center » Server Settings » General and check the boxes for Enable compressed output, Disable evaluation of templates, Disable hostname lookups this will make your site a little bit faster.

[rd]

I don't consider a VPS with 1 GB of RAM as highest level but anyways, I think you should check to make sure you don't have something on the server that is eating up CPU. I heard some bad things about Wordpress addons that do that kind of stuff. 

[smp420]

Also if you read about caching in the admin panel it says this "The higher the level of caching enabled the more CPU time will be spent retrieving cached information."

[rd]

Also, I would like to ask:

Why are you caching a VPS? I'm guessing you only have like two sites hosted.

Caching is a bad idea and if your in a VPS then I think you don't even need to cache.

[smp420]

Actually I am pretty sure by default in smf, caching is set to level 1.

[Leemy]

It was set to Level 1. I just turned it off and will see if anything gets better (would the effect be immediate? because there was no immediate improvement).

As for 'highest level', sorry it's the highest level of 'vps' that my host provides.  above that (but below dedicated), they have the 'hybrid' servers.  hosts seem to label these as 2-16 gig RAM, and analogous features.  What I mean is whenever I check into parallels the RAM using is always < 15%, so idk why suddenly the site would be going crazy

[Leemy]

I uploaded a status.php  (remove the space from the link, below)

http://bhangrateamsforum.com/discuss/ status.php

will this help in debugging?  Thanks to everyone, again. I appreciate your input.

[Leemy]

I logged into phpMyAdmin to see if there's some SQL issue (although i am no expert).  I see this message at the bottom:

.
The additional features for working with linked tables have been deactivated. To find out why click here.

When I click a link to learn more, the details are:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['pmadb'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['relation'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
General relation features: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_info'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
Display Features: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_coords'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['pdf_pages'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
Creation of PDFs: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['column_info'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
Displaying Column Comments: Disabled
Bookmarked SQL query: Disabled
Browser transformation: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['history'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
SQL history: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['designer_coords'] ...   not OK [ Documentation ]
Designer: Disabled

Is this part of the issue? I dont recognize seeing this in my previous log-ins to phpMyAdmin

[Adish - (F.L.A.M.E.R)]

I see it loading pretty quickly now? Is this resolved?

If services fail, then there are some config problems. You might want to rebuild apache if httpd fails constantly. Also, you might be running out of memory which is another cause of the failures.

[Leemy]

Since the SMF RC3 upgrade, there have been no reports of 15+ second load times.  I havent brought any mods back yet.  However, I did receive many cpanel restart notifications on Monday and Tuesday.  What's weird is that they did not correlate with downtime on the site, nor are they when I normally see peak traffic.  In fact, even 'peak traffic' nowadays is maybe 50-60% of peak traffic a few months ago, and I had zero issues then.  Yes, the host says the memory/cpu usage is getting too high.

[Adish - (F.L.A.M.E.R)]

So yea, there is the problem. Increase your server memory or upgrade the processor. It will get you going.

[Leemy]

but my issue is that i've seen much more traffic on the site w/ no load issues.  now suddenly less traffic is causing massive problems?