Performance problems after update

[ThomasSch]

I duplicated an old vb4 instance and upgraded the copy to vb5. Now the old vb4 site and the copy vb5 site are running on the same set of servers. However, the vb5 version is considerably slower than the old site. Posts take 30+ seconds to publish, and also just calling any page can easily take 30 seconds. All is quite fast on the old site. Anybody any clues?

There's a ticket #1569055 already open for our vBulletin upgrade. I added a comment regarding the performance issues. I would appreciate it if someone could have a look.

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin 5 has more functionality and the pages are more dynamic than vBulletin 4. It will run slower due to this. Most of this is hidden by AJAX that operates behind the scenes and caching. However, certain server environments will be more strained by the dynamic.

[ThomasSch]

So what you are telling me is basically the upgrade was a bad move.

[Trevor Hannant]

Not all sites are suitable for upgrade to vB5 at this time, depending on a number of factors including but not limited to:

- number of forums (channels)
- number of threads/posts

There are some sites that we've tried to upgrade that just don't work well due to these and other factors although a future release may work for the site better than now. You've done the right thing in testing though rather than just taking the plunge - however I'd still look at where you see your bottlenecks occurring on your server as there may be ways to tweak performance at a server level to make your site run faster.

[ThomasSch]

I experimented with larger server sizes today, but there was hardly any difference. What I don't understand is that it usually takes ages for the create-content/loadnewposts callback to be triggered, but if I don't wait and reload the page instead, the new post is always there and nothing about the page seems to be wrong. What else is going on in the request that I am supposed to wait for?

[Mark.B]

What are you using for email on the forum?
Is there an SMTP server set? Or is it using php?

[ThomasSch]

I've tried both - no difference. We use AWS SES for email.

[ThomasSch]

As Trevor wrote, not all sites are suitable for vB5, so I guess this is one of them. Unfortunately, staying with vB4 is not an option for our management either. I'm looking into migration options right now.

[glennrocksvb]

How many posts do you have? Do you have a big board? What are the server specs?

[ThomasSch]

The post count ist close to 5 million. I used various server sizes with little performance difference, currently two AWS EC2 t2.xlarge (4 cores, 16GB - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) as web servers and one AWS RDS db.m3.xlarge (4 cores, 15GB - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS...anceClass.html) as database server.

[ThomasSch]

The current vb4 production system is here: http://forum.glamour.de/
Please let me know whether the board is too big for vB5, so that we can look for an alternative solution.

[ThomasSch]

I just set up a new empty vB5 on the same servers for comparison, and it's lightning fast. I would be happy to archive part of the board, but couldn't find any out of the box solution for that either.

[ThomasSch]

And I quadrupled all server sizes (cores and RAM), which didn't change anything whatsoever. The time to publish a post remains at around 15 seconds.

[glennrocksvb]

What's your PHP Memory Limit? Try increasing it.

[Wayne Luke]

Per your ticket, I can't recreate most of the performance issues that you cite using the account provided for login. Posting does take longer but it does a lot of processing there and additional time is to be expected.

A new install will be lightning fast because it has no content. Once you start adding content, adding usergroups, changing permissions, hiding channels and topics, customizing modules, etc... it will take additional time in performance. However, we're constantly working to improve performance and trying to improve the user experience.