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DVDA
Starting Member
9 Posts |
 Posted - 20 July 2003 : 18:23:12
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As I stated in another post, we are doing a major expansion and wish to stick with snitz. However we expect to easily have 1-2000 people at a time using the forums. What is the most users at a time that other forums admins have seen?
We are planning to run snitz as well as the other site data all in Mysql off of a dedicated 2.4Ghz Pentium 4, 1024MBs of RAM (PC2100 DDR), 60GB hard drive with 80GBs bandwidth available.
I am not familiar with how much traffic snitz can really handle so I'd be really appreciative to anyone who can offer advice. Right now we have one site running with snitz and over the past few months have had over 100,000 posts by constant users who just stay logged in and post like there is no tomorrow. I think our high record is around 100 constant users at one time. We are doing a major expansion that will be adding 80 or more websites to our network, and I'm trying to set it up so that they all share the same user system and snitz forums which will be broken down into different sections according to their area.
Idealy we want to use a .net forum because the site is in .net, but honestly everything out there as far as .net forums suck. After being an admin on snitz for the past 3 years there is no way I will settle for lesser features. heh. Can anyone forsee potential problems with having 1-2000 users all accessing at the same time? If so please list ideas and solutions.
I'm paying a designer a lot of money to set up this network for me, and the last thing i want is to get everything integrated and up and running, and then find out that the forums crash the whole network and we have to start from scratch with .net forums. ugggh.
Thanks soo much for any help, and thanks again for everyone who adds to snitz. This is by far the best forum software out there. :) |
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 04:12:40
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Hi DVDVA,
never having seen a forum with that many (2000) concurrent users, I have no idea how it will perform, I will say a few things though. Of all the forums I host, the only ones which are able to cope with high volumes of traffic are those that are standard out of the box Snitz forums, ALL those that contain mods, start to fall over when they reach around 40 concurrent users (they start hogging system resources and SQL memory)
1024Mb of ram may not be enough for that kind of server access either, ram is cheap, fit as much as you can get in it. |
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work mule
Senior Member
USA
1358 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 19:04:03
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Are you using MySQL or was that meant to be MSSQL? (Just curious)
Well, we had a chance to go for a nice high number when we sent out a mailing to the entire list  , but we kind of blew our chance (at least for now). With the active users mod, we're listing 332 for our Trains.com forums. However there were a couple of problems that slowed down the site to the point of being unuseable.
If you're interested in reading more about it, read my post here:
Suggestion for chkUser() & new index
http://forum.snitz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=46170
Another thing I did was lower our timeout for persistant connections to 15 seconds (IIS default is 900 seconds, Apache default is 15 seconds). For a high traffic site, you don't want to persist the connection for too long.
I'm confident that given the changes I've made this past week, the site and the forums will definitely support a lot more active users than 332. Now I have to be patient for one of the newsletters to be sent that will generate that kind of activity. I'm really eager to find out what the limit is now. |
Edited by - work mule on 21 July 2003 19:05:24 |
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MarkJH
Senior Member
United Kingdom
1722 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 19:19:51
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quote:
ALL those that contain mods, start to fall over when they reach around 40 concurrent users
Huw, i've had well over 80 concurrent users and the forums run just as quickly as they do with only a few. I've implemented dozens of mods, including active users. I'm on a shared SQL 2000 server. |
Bandlink.net - http://www.bandlink.net/
Bandlink Music Forums - http://www.bandlink.net/forum/ |
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Doug G
Support Moderator
USA
6493 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 19:46:23
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For 1000-2000 concurrent online visitors I believe your hardware configuration is underpowered. If you are planning to run the database software on the same box, well, even more underpowered.
$0.02
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Doug G
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Computer history and help at www.dougscode.com |
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 19:56:50
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quote:
i've had well over 80 concurrent users
According to what ? active users mod or a realtime log analyser ?
As the two will be vastly different
I was only stating what I have observed in terms of server resource useage, and without exception if you compare two sites with similar traffic, the modded forum will use 30%+ more resources and open 10 times as many connections to the database. |
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work mule
Senior Member
USA
1358 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 20:27:37
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| HuwR, besides using a realtime log analyser, what about the Performance monitor? Would you look at number of connections or number of anonymous users or ? |
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 21 July 2003 : 21:38:31
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quote:
what about the Performance monitor? Would you look at number of connections or number of anonymous users or ?
Neither, only a real time log analyser can give you an indication of your websites traffic, perfmon does not know about things like spiders etc which will artificially increase your online count (users will also not leave until your sessions expire, also artificially increasing your concurrent user count) |
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work mule
Senior Member
USA
1358 Posts |
Posted - 22 July 2003 : 11:26:31
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That's true -- good points.
The only thing about spiders though is that they still contribute to the load on the server, so when looking at server load, I would think you'd want to include them. |
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Beaudoin
New Member
Canada
75 Posts |
Posted - 22 July 2003 : 11:43:13
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| If I were you, I would ensure that you were running an SQL database rather than access because it is so much more efficient. Also, I would make sure your running good servers with qualified people who can monitor and maintain the traffic flow. I guess the performance of the forum will greatly depend on the amount of querries your server can handle. |
Jason Beaudoin
Army Web Designer
Canadian Army
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 22 July 2003 : 11:45:01
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quote:
The only thing about spiders though is that they still contribute to the load on the server, so when looking at server load, I would think you'd want to include them.
Not if they are well behaved spiders, they will obviously load it somewhat, but they will not have the same impact as a similar number of distinct users would.
The biggest problem I have noticed with modded forums is the number of open connections they have to the db, something I have not managed to figure out yet, even after looking at five different sites, which all seem to open and close datasets etc as they should, but something is definately causing them to open more connections even with the same number of active users. This increased number of connections causes the LSASS process to start consuming upwards of 50% processor until finally if the useage is sustained, it pegs the server out at 99% cpu, (the sql server never even breaks into a sweat by the way), the bottleneck is in the web servers local security service. This behaviour NEVER occurs with an unmodded forum, even with well over 100 active users |
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work mule
Senior Member
USA
1358 Posts |
Posted - 22 July 2003 : 12:07:41
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That's kind of odd. Do any of the mods create new connections or do they continue to work off of the original connection?
Does it have anything to do with pooling?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/techart/pooling2.html
In my applications I know it's supposed to be the default setting, but I explicitly set "OLE DB Services = -1;" in my connection strings and the number of connections remain for the whole site remain very low. On the other hand, I've noticed that for other applications (that weren't done by me) will have 3-5x the number of connections, but less activity.
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 22 July 2003 : 14:30:38
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quote:
Does it have anything to do with pooling?
No I don't think so, some of them had extra connections, but I changed them to use the default one and made sure they were all being closed and relased, but it had no apparent effect, I am now running some traces to find out what is getting the most activity to see if it will indicate where it may be occuring, I will also try lowering the default timeout to 15 seconds, it is currently set to 30 and see if that helps clear them out. |
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DVDA
Starting Member
9 Posts |
Posted - 24 July 2003 : 02:07:15
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| work mule: we plan to run mySQL because the license fee per month was 199 bucks for ms sql and that is more than we can afford at this time. We also plan to run little to no mods off of the forum so i'm hoping that by keeping it just the pure latest version that we will hold up to the traffic. Thanks for all these suggestions we really appreciate it. :) |
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HuwR
Forum Admin
United Kingdom
20595 Posts |
Posted - 24 July 2003 : 04:32:10
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quote:
fee per month was 199 bucks for ms sql
??? I was not aware that MS issued monthly licences |
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work mule
Senior Member
USA
1358 Posts |
Posted - 24 July 2003 : 11:05:12
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| If they were talking about web hosting fees then that might be the fee charged by the provider, but there's no mention of that. Otherwise, same here, I thought MS wants their money up front. |
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