The index page of the forum should now be loading a lot faster than before.
Unfortunately, I've had to restart the database and chat. Please let us know if any issues arise.
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My computer's graphics card used to crash here all the time (it's dying), and the first time I'd respond to a topic upon launching the browser, it'd stall and make the window vanish while trying to process it.
I am happy to say both of those problems appear to be gone, and the site indeed seems much faster.
Unfortunately, I've had to restart the database and chat.
Break out the long query log and and start adding indexes.
Honestly unless the php is a big ball of class mud, then that's what's slowing it down. If there is no index on a column that is referenced in a query, then it will do full table scans, which even on the fastest computers take significant amounts of time.
If the forum was significantly faster when you first began using it, and it is growing slower as time goes by, then that's a clear signal you are missing indexes on the tables. You can use EXPLAIN as well on core queries to better understand which indexes are referenced. You can add indexes without restarts. So it's not that disruptive.
:) As it happens, you're on the mark regarding the cause of why the forum was slowing down. In the recent update, what we changed to improve speed was the addition of an index, as well as query optimizations intended to eliminate filesort. Then we restarted mysql to be safe.
The speed gain was noticable, so I suspect we'll be appreciating indexes more.
PHP compiles lightning fast these days... it's only the inclusion of huge libraries that will slow it down.
If the page is slow on one load, then fast on subqequent loads, that's evidence that caching has fixed the slow query the second time around. It is almost always an index issue. The only other things are scripts that connect to web services over sockets that hang and timeout.
Somewhere there is a slow query log, and depending on the server configuration you may or may not have access to it. If it's a vps, yeah, you have access, if it's shared, you probably don't. In either event, queries that take too much time are logged in the slow query log.
Hope that helps...
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