Forum very slow - where to start from?

[juanmeitor]

Hi all,

My forum is manualens . com/foro
 
It's been running for years now. The last years without any kind of maintenance.

It has become really slow, with typical page load times of 15 seconds average. Guest access is open, so it's easy to check.

Its SMF 2.0.15. Patches have been applied version by version from 2.0 to current version.

It has a few mods and SimplePortal 2.3.3

PHP version is 5.6.40
MySQL 5.6.41-84.1

The DB is only 142MB and traffic is not heavy at all.

It is located on a shared server (A Small Orange). The support teams says the server is ok. I think so, as I see that when I navigate Administration section of the forum it goes fast, but when I navigate through topics and messages, it all goes really slow (1 vs 15 seconds to load).

I have searched the SMF documentation and internet posts, but the settings I have changed (performance enhancements) didn't make any change.

I have performed all the maintenance and repair tasks at Administration. Everything looks ok, but the load times aren't.

What can I do? I think it's DB related, but I don't have to knowledge to sort it out.

Can you help, please?

Thank you in advance.

[Shambles]

Hi

Here's what I've observed.

Topics that have few posts containing links, open faster than those with many links or images.

As an experiment, try disabling hostname lookups:

    Admin >> Configuration >> Server Settings >> General .. Disable Hostname Lookups

This disables host name lookups, which on some servers are very slow. Note that this will make banning less effective.

[juanmeitor]

Hi Shambles,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Unfortunately Hostname lookups are already disabled.

[shadav]

nothing to do with speed but  you should update your forum to 2.0.18 and your php to 7.4 as ph 5.x has been end of life and even php 7.2 is now outdated

you could also try signing up for a free account at cloudflare and see if that doesn't help some

looking at your site I notice an error

Code Select Expand

GET http://manualens.com/foro/mobiquo/smartbanner/appbanner.js net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
GET http://manualens.com/foro/mobiquo/tapatalkdetect.js net::ERR_ABORTED 404 (Not Found)
seems you either tried to install or uninstall the tapatalk mod at some point and it didn't fully install/uninstall so that could be part of the issue

[juanmeitor]

nothing to do with speed but  you should update your forum to 2.0.18 and your php to 7.4 as ph 5.x has been end of life and even php 7.2 is now outdated

you could also try signing up for a free account at cloudflare and see if that doesn't help some

looking at your site I notice an error

Code Select Expand

GET http://manualens.com/foro/mobiquo/smartbanner/appbanner.js net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
GET http://manualens.com/foro/mobiquo/tapatalkdetect.js net::ERR_ABORTED 404 (Not Found)
seems you either tried to install or uninstall the tapatalk mod at some point and it didn't fully install/uninstall so that could be part of the issue

Hi shadav.

I stopped the SMF update at 2.0.15 because the 2.0.16 patch reported a bunch of errors at the test prior to the real update. I thought I could leave the forum in an even worse state, so I didn't dare to continue and apply the 2.0.16 patch.

I have updated PHP to version 7.4.26. Thanks!

Regarding Tapatalk, curiously now it's the only way to navigate at an acceptable speed through the forum. It's not slow as the normal web version. I'll have a look at it as well.

[shawnb61]

2.0.15 will not run 7.4.  2.0.15 will only run php versions from 5.4 - 7.1.
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Requirements_and_recommendations

I would check all error logs, including SMF, apache, & DB error logs.  Scour your cpanel for error lists.

I would also check for aggressive crawlers.  Download your access logs & look to see if there is an unusual amount of activity from certain IPs.

Scour your access logs for clues / errors. 

I find it helpful to take a few hours of the access logs & load them into Excel (space delimiter) and analyze activity by IP.  If you have a crazy active IP, you may need to block them until you understand what is going on.  See if that fixes it.

[SpacePhoenix]

Might be worth checking the MySQL slow query log: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/slow-query-log.html

[juanmeitor]

Might be worth checking the MySQL slow query log: hxxp:dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/slow-query-log.html [nonactive]

Hi SpacePhoenix.

I looked at this link. It suggests using the command "mysqldumpslow" to check. I don't know where to issue this command. I tried on the SQL section of phpMyAdmin, but it's not recognized.

Sorry for beeing such a newbie on this, but I need a more detailed explanation. 

Thanks!