Common difficulties with running large forums

Many of us know what it takes to get a new forum set up, launched, and remotely successful, and we can also fare well with moderately-active forums.

But few of us have ever reached "big board" status, or had a forum that is overflowing with activity (at least a stable 1k post per day average rate). So with all of that activity, I'm sure the tasks and responsibilities greatly vary from those of the maintenance of a small or medium-sized forum.

If you have a large and very active community, it would be interesting to hear some of the new responsibilities and duties that come with such tremendous growth.

 

Guess I fit that boat right now, one site i'm helping out on just moved to 2x load balanced web servers + db server setup to handle ~200k unique visitors/day.

Current pain in back side is dealing with attachments in file system to be sync'd between the 2 web servers and future additional web servers. Doesn't help that throw in a badly coded (ever see 4000+ queries per page load ?) drupal piece of crap's image uploads in file system and photopost gallery images in file system too.

Definitely a must is installing memcached on web servers to help scale the forums/site etc. You can no longer get away with xcache/apc/eaccelerator when you move to multi-server setups. Had a bitch of time getting memcached modules to work with the custom drupal install as patches etc didn't work right. But vB worked well out of the box with memcached

I guess backups would be another things big boards folks need to deal with. I took the easy route there though via R1Soft CDP backup and mysql plugins so there's virtually no additional load on the system for backup/restorations R1Soft Features of High Performance Linux Server Backup and Disaster Recovery Software – Continuous Data Protection Enterprise Edition :: R1Soft

Guess another thing is covering costs - luckily i'm not paying for this setup but I guess it's the #1 or #2 concern for big board setups

 

Backups - My isp has a 10 gig limit every month. Backing up my sites to my computer takes about 5 - 7 gigs of that 10. Just one database is 1.2 - 1.3 gigs.

Dealing with bouncing emails from members that no longer have the address they registered with. ISPs dont like it when you bounce a lot of emails.

Dealing with lots of problems members.

 

Kevin compress your sql backups ? 1.2GB sql file compresses to around 350MB

zip -r backup.zip backup.sql

 

That is a very informative post p4guru.
200k unique per day is massive. Im only at ~40k per day. Its nice to know what issues will be next.

Currently I am trying to get all processes, including backup to be scheduled at the correct time, as an activity spark or a DDOS attack combined with some heavy processes can result in the site becoming unreachable.

The allowed number of connections has been raised further and further over time. Where we were at 50 years ago, we are now at 400 and rising. How has this gone for you p4guru?

What security issues did you encounter when going to a multiple server setup? Did the amount of your sites traffic cause security concerns?

 

Well, thanks for scaring the shit of my guys on wanting my forum to be large.

 

haha fattony69 - at least you can prepare some spare undewear in advance now

Ah see this is where i leave it to the pros - security wise let my web host handle it all Not that there are any security concerns so far

As to connections, you mean to apache or mysql ? Probably need to due both as mysql defaults aren't going to cut it. Really depends on your setup though. For this large site decided to dump apache as web server and use litespeed web server from litespeedtech.com nearly 6-10x times faster. First time using litespeed so another learning curve, as I'm only familiar with apache and nginx.

Benchmark Comparison on Serving Small Static Files: LiteSpeed vs Apache vs Nginx LiteSpeed Blog

Benchmark Comparison on Serving Simple PHP: LiteSpeed vs Apache vs Nginx LiteSpeed Blog

I usually use nginx for static files but folks have success switching from apache to nginx for both static + php serving (since each page load there's many more static files vs php i.e. this forum thread page has 129 items being loaded only of which 5-6 are php i think). Yeah litespeed 2x times faster than apache and 5x times faster than nginx for php. Apache is 2x times faster than nginx for php. But for static files, litespeed is 2x times faster than nginx which is 2x times faster than apache. Or litespeed is 3x to 4x times faster than apache for static files.

 

I mean mysql database connections.

I was planning to go for lighttpd. The stats on litespeedtech seem interesting. The software license price of $2.000 per 8 core server is less attractive.

 

@p4guru

Are you using the free or paid version from litespeedtech.com?

 

Using paid enterprise version of litespeed as it supports jail/chroot environment while free version doesn't and limited in number of connections compared to enterprise version. Cost wise it's high but you'd only be justifying it after certain amount of traffic/size for your sites. Cheaper alternative for sites not in that league of traffic yet and income earning potential, would be nginx since it's free - good place to start Nginx Forum and wiki.nginx.org.

 

Yes, I've been contemplating nginx. But our server is not that busy, at least not yet.

 

You can always go half way use apache to serve php and retain htaccess support as is and just use nginx as a reverse proxy to apache to serve only static files/images. Best of both worlds so to speak You can see example of this setup on iwsti.com and rs25.com (not my sites).

 

I'm not technical, but yes, my understanding is serving the static files with nginx and using apache for the rest of the server is what George recommends at vb.com, at least in some circumstances.

Although it may not be worth the trouble as long as our server load is below 0.05 : )

 

Mhm. My server load is normally around 2.00 but is getting regular peaks at 7.00 (8 cores) If this persists, then I guess its time to move to a multi-server setup. Will be exciting.