Slow opening of threads

[useless01]

Hey!


I'm currently running a SMF 1.0.3 board and lately (in the last week) I've noticed how the board has gotten slower and slower. The biggest problem is posting and opening threads. It can take anything from 20 to 400 seconds to open a discussion.

The load averages are ok: 0.07, 0.08, 0.04

In PHPMyAdmin I can see processes that are in "sleep" mode even when the board is in maintenance mode and there's not much traffic. Even when the board is closed, the speed is still the same. So it doesn't seem to be related to traffic.


The MySQL version is 3.23.58 because that's the default one in Plesk and my host doesn't seem to be interested in upgrading at the moment.


Some MySQL stats:

Connections per second:  0.7656 
Kilobytes received per second:  0.2932 
Kilobytes sent per second:  0.3549 
Queries per second:  9.6624 
Percentage of slow queries:  0 
Opened vs. Open tables:
(table_cache)  9345.9219 (should be <= 80) 
Table cache usage:
(table_cache)  1 (should be >= 0.5 and <= 0.9) 
Key buffer read hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.0091 (should be <= 0.01) 
Key buffer write hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.5989 (should be <= 0.5) 
Thread cache hit rate:
(thread_cache_size)  1 (should be <= 0.05) 
Thread cache usage:
(thread_cache_size)  0 (should be >= 0.8 and <= 0.9) 
Temporary table disk usage:
(tmp_table_size)  0.7947 (should be <= 0.5) 
Sort merge pass rate:
(sort_buffer)  0 (should be <= 0.001) 
Query cache enabled:
(query_cache_type)  0 (should be >= 1 and <= 1)



Any idea what has caused this sudden slow down?


Thanks.

[Oldiesmann]

3.23.58? That's ancient!

I'm not sure what the problem could be here, as there are many things that could affect the time it takes a topic to load. Try optimizing your tables and clearing out unimportant logs (both are under Forum Maintenance in the admin section) and see if that helps. Then, yell at your host and tell them to upgrade (threaten to find another host if that's what it takes...).

[useless01]

I've done both the optimization and cleared the logs. I regularly do that.

Edited to add:

I used the debug mode to see how long the MySQL queries for the slow loading pages took.


Opening a thread:
Page created in 120.324 seconds with 21 queries.
But none of the queries took longer than 0.001 seconds.

Opening personal message inbox:
Page created in 80.24 seconds with 13 queries.
But none of the queries took longer than 0.005 seconds.


So it's not the database?

[useless01]

I think I found the problem.

I disabled "Check the avatar size every time it is displayed" and now the board's back to normal again.


That feature's been in use for months with no problems. I still don't know what caused this week's problems.