Twenty-four things you can do to make SMF go faster (Updated June 16th, 2010)

[Arantor]

I think it has been entered incorrectly, and the 'disappearing' is either because of using an older template in the admin panel or a mod's broken it since it works just fine on a fresh install.

[Brettflan]

btw this forum here is still v difficult to read because of severe staccato scrolling problems (i am using firefox on a mac and did post on this some months ago)

This is usually due to having a zoom level set in Firefox, it causes stuttery scrolling. Go to View->Zoom->Reset in the top menu of Firefox, or alternately the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+0 (number zero, not letter O).

[Crip]

That works , just reset mine

t/y

[stog]

and me thx, now excellent and fast
np with our own 1.1.12 forums so is this a 2 thing 

re - empty avatar upload url field
the manageattachmentstemplate is the same as a fresh 1.1.12 one, but i agree something to do with many upgrades and mods! thx for looking

[Swayforth]

thx brettflan,
just been back to check after a sleep and find that the upload url is blank, so i retyped and saved;   it accepts the url (which is the same as the avatar url at the top, and my admin avatar appears (so the url is correct), then i go to home page to check the members avatars - no joy  .. no avatars -- so i return to avatar setting, only to find the upload url field empty and admin avatar gone?

thx for your help
also tried repair_settings , where it wants me to use /avatars instead of /avs for the avatar url

am also wondering whether tinyportal is involved

I too am having the exact same problem after upgrading my Tinyportal Mod. Something in this mod is causing the issue.

SMF 1.1.3
TinyPortal 1.0 RC1

Anyone have any ideals, i would rather not revert back to putting avatars in my attachment folder.

[CrocWeb]

Thanks for sharing.

[Xarcell]

I found this topic very useful. I have followed most of it's suggestions.

I have a few questions about my forum that is being rebuilt. It's using SMF 2.0RC5, heavily modded(mostly template stuff)and has zero user's and traffic ATM. Goal is to have million posts, and around 500 online user's at a time in a year's time. I know that's high, but it's just a goal.

So I have to ask, about at what point do you think "there is too many boards", from a performance stand point. I'm currently trying to keep my boards to a minimum, but there are 38 boards already(only 12 visible from index). I need more boards, but I refuse to add any more at this point.

Also, about at what point should I be worried about too many "queries"? My site has no traffic, only me working on it. It's already using an average of 15 queries. A couple of months or maybe a year from now, if it says "50 queries", I should be concerned right? I do plan to add a portal and I know that will impact it a bit.

I'm just trying to start off on the right foot.

[Arantor]

From a pure performance standpoint, too many is any more than you can safely do without. There's no right or wrong answer as to how many, though as I learned recently, one board with half a million topics in it brings its own performance issues.

38 boards isn't that high, and it certainly isn't likely to present a problem with a million posts. But if you don't have a decent proportion of content (say, 30-50 topics per board), you probably have too many anyway.

Also, about at what point should I be worried about too many "queries"?

The number of queries per page is not scaled based on content particularly. Last week I had a test forum with 1.5m posts in 500k topics and never went above 16 queries per page. 50 queries is a high number to be using per page, and while a portal will push it up, most portals don't tend to edge it above 25 or so, which is generally fine per page.

[Something like that]

Disabling the calendar will save you significant queries if it ever becomes an issue.

[Xarcell]

From a pure performance standpoint, too many is any more than you can safely do without. There's no right or wrong answer as to how many, though as I learned recently, one board with half a million topics in it brings its own performance issues.

38 boards isn't that high, and it certainly isn't likely to present a problem with a million posts. But if you don't have a decent proportion of content (say, 30-50 topics per board), you probably have too many anyway.

Also, about at what point should I be worried about too many "queries"?

The number of queries per page is not scaled based on content particularly. Last week I had a test forum with 1.5m posts in 500k topics and never went above 16 queries per page. 50 queries is a high number to be using per page, and while a portal will push it up, most portals don't tend to edge it above 25 or so, which is generally fine per page.

Thanks. Good to know.

Disabling the calendar will save you significant queries if it ever becomes an issue.

I seen that in the first post. I haven't disabled it as I plan to use it, but if my user's won't use it at least moderately, I will disable it.

[Xarcell]

I also got another concern, but this is unavoidable as it's needed for my site.

Does excessive membergroups cause any serious performance problems? I have around 105 membergroups, every membergroup will be used.

[Arantor]

Only if you have lots of users in lots of different membergroups at the same time. How are you using the groups?

[Xarcell]

Then it may be a problem.

I have a script that auto-assigns a member by age, to a membergroup. Example, if you are 34 years old, you will be auto-assigned to membergroup "Age 34".

[Arantor]

So, how many groups are users likely to be in at once?

[Xarcell]

It depends on the traffic. My site is under construction and is not yet active. It will build over time, but I'm hoping for million posts, 500 active user's online at once within the first year.

[Arantor]

You haven't answered my question. How many different groups is a user likely to be in at once? I CANNOT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION WITHOUT THIS.

[Xarcell]

You haven't answered my question. How many different groups is a user likely to be in at once? I CANNOT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION WITHOUT THIS.

Geez

I misread your first post Arantor.

Minimum of 1, maximum of 7, maybe an average of 2 or 3. Not counting postgroup, which I don't care to have.

[Arantor]

That shouldn't be a problem. Post group you can't remove without rewriting the table structure anyway.

[Xarcell]

Ok, thanks Arantor.

Keep up the good work.

[Vekseid]

I found this topic very useful. I have followed most of it's suggestions.

I have a few questions about my forum that is being rebuilt. It's using SMF 2.0RC5, heavily modded(mostly template stuff)and has zero user's and traffic ATM. Goal is to have million posts, and around 500 online user's at a time in a year's time. I know that's high, but it's just a goal.

So I have to ask, about at what point do you think "there is too many boards", from a performance stand point. I'm currently trying to keep my boards to a minimum, but there are 38 boards already(only 12 visible from index). I need more boards, but I refuse to add any more at this point.

The log_mark_read and log_boards tables grow by users * boards. Ideally, these two should be combined, but SMF tends to keep all entries in these tables around, rather than e.g. pruning them for inactive members.

If the size of these two tables for users who are on-line over a short period becomes greater than your server can load into memory, you will have performance issues.

It's mostly a memory limit, however, so e.g. for Elliquiy, where I have eight gigabytes dedicated to the InnoDB buffer, it's not a big issue (though the total InnoDB data size has passed 17GB), and I can handle hundreds of boards and tens of thousands of members without issue. Hopefully some schema improvements in the version after 2.0 can take place, allowing more growth in that department.

Also, about at what point should I be worried about too many "queries"? My site has no traffic, only me working on it. It's already using an average of 15 queries. A couple of months or maybe a year from now, if it says "50 queries", I should be concerned right? I do plan to add a portal and I know that will impact it a bit.

This really depends on the type of queries. I've passed five thousand write queries per second while doing some updates. These were serial updates that required individualized processing, with little to no blocking involved as it was mostly updating old posts from one forum format to another.

If multiple updates are blocking each other, however, or if the query plan isn't so simple, you are going have a lower limit. Conversely, a high read load with a lot of memory can make reads effectively painless.

Same can be said for writes on a high-quality (SLC) SSD drive.

Right now for Elliquiy I tend to peak around 2,000-3,000 queries per second, with an average load over the course of a given day peaking around 500. This is with APC caching enabled at level 2. Most queries are for the ajax chat.

...ultimately, though? Worry about that point when you get to it, would be my advice. Right now your primary focus should be getting the membership to need hardware like that.