[Please read]Cut down the memory consumption and CPU load

[naderman]

There's also Sphinx for phpBB available now which is suited for really big boards and should be performing very well. Right now you need to check it out from subversion, packages with instructions will follow shortly.

[roobarb]

There's also Sphinx for phpBB available now which is suited for really big boards and should be performing very well. Right now you need to check it out from subversion, packages with instructions will follow shortly.

cool, thanks for the tip. I'm expecting to reach 1000 registered users with up to half of that logging on at any one time. My board does really nifty things with search. There's thousands of topics. 10,000 posts so far

Would it help if I posted my mysql system variables? not all mysql servers are created equal

[naderman]

That doesn't even sound like a huge board yet Sphinx would work for you nonetheless. Why would you post MySQL system variables?

[roobarb]

That doesn't even sound like a huge board yet Sphinx would work for you nonetheless. Why would you post MySQL system variables?

I think what caused my problem was the way my particular board uses searches. it's a gardening forum and in some parts it's a bit like an encyclopedia.

I thought system variables would be useful because in practically every other place where I've read about similar woes the first thing that happens is that the ISP is dissed as running a substandard sql service, meaning lack of resources. Whilst that is sometimes true, in other cases it's not, and system variables would show you what is set to what.. This topic was the first one I've seen trying to deal with it in a reasoned way, and I've been trying to sort the problem for near on 3 weeks. It doesn't help that the documentation for 3.0.0 is incomplete, and there is no chapter on how to tune performance of the board or which causes what. Now that I've switched to mysql fullsearch, the board runs smoothly, it is not overloading mysql and everyone's happy, 25 users concurrently and it's not breaking a sweat. Why does it default to fulltext native for the search backend...

[roobarb]

3) Make sure that Apache/Php do not fork too much.
I configured 24 Mb in Php.ini and set sessions to 300 seconds.
After 5 minutes of inactivity, sessions are freed.

How "expensive" is forking ? i mean how much memory per fork, how much does it slow down, how many forks per user?