Some hosts overload their servers. No, really, it’s true. I know some of you know this, but many people don’t and are quite surprised when they ask me see what I can do to improve the performance of their board. One of the first things I do before taking on a client with this type of request is run a check to see how many other sites are hosted on the same server. If the number is over 100, I don’t bother doing much other than telling the potential client to get a better host. How do you find this out? It’s not hard, really.

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Through some sort of technical glitch most of this post was missing. I’ve updated it with the rest of the content. My apologies.

A few days ago I posted Part III in my ongoing series where I am comparing phpBB3 to phpBB-Dave (my customized phpBB2-based board) from a feature perspective. I hopefully have made it clear that I am not claiming that my board is technically superior, as I am quite sure that it is not. The experimentation I did with the template engines several months back proved that, at the very least.

Part III included a review of the caching process for each board. A vanilla phpBB2 board does not offer any caching (outside of an early form of template caching). My version is caching quite a bit of information, as does phpBB3. I’ve reproduced that specific table here, as it will help clarify the points made later in this post.

One interesting result of Londonvasion for me was that I found out that there are team members that stop by and read my blog (at least occasionally) that don’t leave comments. DavidMJ, one of the current members of the phpBB3 development team, is apparently one of those folks. He caught me on IRC a few nights ago and offered to help explain the caching routines from phpBB3 and I was quick to take him up on his offer. Here is an excerpt from our conversation; I found it extremely enlightening.

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Some time back I wrote the Forum Auth by Post Count MOD for phpBB2. I had to write it because so many people were using an “auto-group” MOD of some kind, and using it to grant permissions to view or post in specific forums. The general idea is good. In my opinion, the implementation is bad and can have a substantial negative impact on your board.

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I am very excited that phpBB user Brainy has been working on an updated template engine for phpBB2. However, at the moment I can’t get it to work completely. Last night, when I was up late working on other things already anyway, I decided to finally take a look at the template options from the /contrib folder from a standard phpBB2 installation. I was glad I did.

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As regular readers will know (I think I’m up to 3 of you now :lol:) I have been doing some testing and preliminary analysis on some different template engines for phpBB2. However, I have since discovered that the alternate template engines I have been evaluating work fine on most pages but fail on the posting page. So at the moment I have tabled all further posting until I can get a template system that works for all phpBB functions, and not just the basic pages I was refreshing. It’s quite discouraging, as I was hoping to finish reviewing the numbers and roll out my selection on my largest board during our next update.

We’ll be sticking with eXtreme Styles for now. Further details will be posted once I get everything working.

About six or eight months ago I started noticing a really weird behavior from my server. It was always related to pages from my largest phpBB2 board. The first symptom was that the server would slow to a crawl. After connecting to the board via the web host manager or via PuTTY (if I could do either) I would see a system load of 50, 90, even 300+ at one point. When I say system load I am talking about the top-line number from the “top” command. In theory with a four-cpu box my system load should never be higher that 4.0, so a load of 300+ is quite… disturbing.

I checked and changed my apache settings. I checked my database settings. I kept checking and checking and tweaking and nothing made a difference. I finally resorted to blocking IP addresses that exhibited this behavior.

I think I may finally have figured out what was causing my problem. Believe it or not, it was some code in phpBB2. More…

I have been spending my free time working on my other board, so I have not managed to get the analysis done yet for the various template statistics that I captured. What I plan to do is keep exactly 1,000 page refreshes for each template for each trial. I will do this by taking the middle 1,000 results and tossing the best and worst times. This should help provide a better indication of the true performance of each engine.

I do, however, want to complete this before I relaunch the board I am working on as I will include whichever template engine performs the best with that upgrade. So hopefully I will be back to this in the next week or so. Thanks for your patience.

I have completed the data collection phase of the template testing. I have run 10 different scenarios all on my isolated development server. A couple of scenarios are going to be tossed from the final results due to bugs in code or collection anomolies.

So here is what I have to evaluate:

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In Part I of this series of posts I detailed the results from my first benchmark scenario. For that scenario I only ran one session. What I mean by that is I had a single browser window open. With the meta refresh keyword set up in my overall header template I could start a refresh and walk away from the system and let it run for hours.

Given that I have four template engines to test and I want to capture statistics based on at least 1,000 page refreshes for each template engine for each of the four pages in my test case that is… hmm… carry the … multiply…

1,000 refreshes * 4 template engines * 4 pages * 2 second refresh interval

… that’s 32,000 seconds, or roughly one third of a day. I certainly don’t have the time to sit around and do nothing but watch a browser session refresh all day. So it’s nice that I can start the process and leave it alone.

What other test scenarios do I have planned?

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The author of the code I have been testing has started a development topic at www.phpbb.com. So if you want to try the same code that I have been testing, you can to that.

Speedy Template Development Topic

The MOD Author is Brainy. I like their current signature line…

if($do || !$do) $there = $no_try;