How can you stress test 2.0 with only 5-10 people online?

[bigbigsavings]

I've always been curious about this. VB might run fine and dandy here at VB with only 5-10 people online, but what about us, the sites taht have 500+ concurrent users online. How can you properly stress test v2.0 without setting it up on a very busy board to make sure it takes all the abuse it can get?

Thanks.
Alex

[Wayne Luke]

I am sure they are going to do that when it is released for beta testing. Also the vb-World forum is more heavily used than this one, so Jelsoft does get feedback from that.

[James]

Alex,

When we have worked out the majority of the bugs, we will load the version on the VB-World forums (where we almost always have 50 users online).

All the best,

James

[Stallion]

The only bottleneck for vBulletin is MySQL, and the number of queries can be measured with ease. Stress testing could be emulated by comparing the queries in 1.14 with those in 2.0, giving us a good idea of what to expect.

I expect 2.0 to have somewhere around the same number of queries as 1.14, due to optimizations lowering it, but with new features raising it back up.

[CJ]

Originally posted by wluke
I am sure they are going to do that when it is released for beta testing. Also the vb-World forum is more heavily used than this one, so Jelsoft does get feedback from that.
vB-world forums?

url?

[Mike Sullivan]

http://www.vb-world.net

[DD-Fresh]

I work for this site..

http://www.dsschat.com/forum/index.php

We ushally have about 100 and upto 400 ppl online at once.. and there is NO probs..

Vb Is a great fourm even under pressure ;-)

[bigbigsavings]

DD-Fresh,

100-400 is not a problem, hit 600 and then we'll see :)

Alex

[Jake]

Thats why I will probably be waiting a few weeks to see how some of the bigger sites handle with it before we upgrade. (Shoulda done that when it first came out! :))

[Richard Tafoya]

We generally start crashing by the time we get to 300.

[champagne]

Well I get over 100,000 users at the same time on my site.
So Nah!

[DD-Fresh]

So whats your site addy? I would like to check out your fourm.... Thats a crazy amount of ppl.. thats kewl.

What the addy??

Thanks

[TWTCommish]

I think he's pulling your leg, DD. :)

[Joe]

heh, look at his webpage / profile, yahoo.com, for some reason, im sure that site gets 100,000 users on at the same time ;) however i couldnt find where yahoo uses vB, lol

[Thud]

corvetteforum.com bombed earlier today after moving from UBB to vB. The online user count was around 300 and it was slooooooowwwww. 3-4 minutes to load up a new page.

[bigbigsavings]

The ~300 user point seems to be where all sh*t hits the fan. We've been able to sustain 500 users online with little problems, but once everyone starts posting, then all hell breaks loose. At the LONGEST, it took 25-30 seconds to load a page on our site, and tahts with having that many people online. We once went up to 819 people online, and the forums WERE functioning, but slowly. I sure *DO HOPE* that 2.0 will fix this to a CERTAIN extent and am getting EXTREMELY itchy to either try something new or get 2.0 installed. Hopefully this will not drag on into the next year.

Alex

[Martin]

how long do you have your cookies set for? I looked at your board and there don't seem to be a lot of posts for the number users online and that would mean an extremely disproportionately high number of lurkers. If the cookies are set for more than 30 minutes of inactivity, you could have a lot more showing than are really there.

Also, how are you determing the number you have on board at a time? I don't see you online user list. Are you just looking in the session table?

I'm not trying to imply anything here, just curoius :)

[Sharg]

Originally posted by bigbigsavings
The ~300 user point seems to be where all sh*t hits the fan. We've been able to sustain 500 users online with little problems, but once everyone starts posting, then all hell breaks loose. At the LONGEST, it took 25-30 seconds to load a page on our site, and tahts with having that many people online. We once went up to 819 people online, and the forums WERE functioning, but slowly. I sure *DO HOPE* that 2.0 will fix this to a CERTAIN extent and am getting EXTREMELY itchy to either try something new or get 2.0 installed. Hopefully this will not drag on into the next year.

Alex

Alex, this has nothing to do with VB, and you will have the same problems with 2.0. Its a mysql problem.
Mysql got troubles when users average 300. Point.
I heard that a vbulletin using sybase database was being worked on, but we know not much about it. That might be a solution for you.

People must start to realize that a database driven forum DOES take more ressources than a flat file/ html one.

Benj

[Martin]

Benj, I have to totally disagree with the statement that a DB driven forum takes up more resources than a flat-file/HTML one. My UBB would NEVER hold more than 50k posts without adversely affecting the posting times, the posts becoming corrupted (for no reason other than they wanted to as far as I can tell).

I have over 250k posts on my forum right now and rarely less than 100 users except in the wee hours of the morning and it STILL posts faster than my UBB did with half the users and 1/5th the posts.

[Sharg]

So why some of the very big forums making the move revert to ubb ?
There are several examples on these boards of people having to revert to UBB.
Sure, it might be faster to post with a HUGE DB, but an html page display will always be fast...... even on crowded board compared to a database driven mega boards when it might take 30 seconds for the board to construct the post for the user to view....


Benj

[Martin]

I've seen one example of what you're talking about and, as far as I know, he needs to tweak his mySQL settings somewhat. I don't know how much you read, but he has to keep his UBB pruned to 1 week's worth of threadsfor it to function at all, otherwise he gets corrupted files, etc. That doesn't seem like much of a system to go back to, does it?

Really HUGE message boards should be looking for a sturdier back-end than mySQL because it's free, which is why there is development on sybase (which has a free version I just heard about!) and oracle back-ends for this forum program, which you could NEVER do with UBB running in it's flat file format.

[DaBuzz]

Hrmmm ... I tend to keep 80-100 users at a time at during peak periods on my UBB (although the online user tracking may be flaky) so this 300 user max concerns me a bit since I hope to continue to grow my site.

My server is a dual PIII650 w/ 512MB ... think this may help mysql handle more requests or is the problem something that no hardware will fix?

[Jake]

Originally posted by DaBuzz
My server is a dual PIII650 w/ 512MB ... think this may help mysql handle more requests or is the problem something that no hardware will fix?

Thats the same specs that we are running at http://www.wrestlingtalks.com with around 130 members/100 guests at peak periods. The stock vB (1.1.3) couldnt handle it and would take minutes to load pages. But a friend of mine went in and tweaked vB so it would run a lot faster. Im not exactly sure what he did, but it is something to do with the cache. The only drawback is that when you make a new post it takes a couple of minutes for it to show up, but its worth the speed increase.


However Im sure vB 2.0 will be a lot better for performance over the previous versions.

[bigbigsavings]

Jake,

I'd love to speak to you about what your "friend" did, b/c we're running out of solutions here. Can you contact me at alexz@bigbigsavings.com with information on how to get in touch with you? Thanks in advance.

Alex

[Richard Tafoya]

Jake, I'd also love to find out what the "cache" adjustment is.

If you could post a bit more detail once you talk to your friend, a whole bunch of higher-traffic board admins would be very much in your debt.

[Stallion]

My guess is delayed inserts. Read more about 'em at http://www.mysql.com :)