I spent a great many hours last night tuning the forums a little, in fac tit is 1am as I write this and I have to be up for work in another 5 hours and i am not finished yet 
Anyway you will notice that all forum posts are marked as new again. I had to do this as I converted a lot of post tables to InnoDB and needed to cut as much superfluous data as i could to speed up the process. As such the storage for the "post read" information was cleared and the tables altered. If you mark the forums as read again (link at the bottom of each forum) you will again return to normal.
I have also rebuilt the Search Index which I neglected to do a long time ago and as such has taken some time. This will speed up searches and remove some overheads.
You will also be missing your avatars. I have removed remote avatars and changed the upload method so they are now loaded locally instead of further PHP and mysql calls.
I am pretty much at the absolute limit of the Tuning I can do with PHP and MYSQL with the forums and now have to go back and revisit a lot of my code for things like the news and tipping etc and bring those queries down. I will also look at merging a lot of CSS and JS. This should also bring down a few overheads and http requests there fore speeding up each page load on the forums and front page.
I will continue to do profiling over the next few weeks and try to speed the site up as much as possible as it has gradually gotten slower and slower over the past few months for various reasons. We also have a fair bit of data in the site itself which also doesn't help.
I will also start testing some new forum software, both IPB and Vbulletin, both come at a cost of between $145 and $200 USD but I think that purchase will be worth it if it enhances the overall site and it's speed. The general plan will be some fresh installs of the forums and the website and then merging over the data.
It's a long process but in order for us to keep the site loading in reasonable times it is something we will have to do.
Cheers
Dan
Anyway you will notice that all forum posts are marked as new again. I had to do this as I converted a lot of post tables to InnoDB and needed to cut as much superfluous data as i could to speed up the process. As such the storage for the "post read" information was cleared and the tables altered. If you mark the forums as read again (link at the bottom of each forum) you will again return to normal.
I have also rebuilt the Search Index which I neglected to do a long time ago and as such has taken some time. This will speed up searches and remove some overheads.
You will also be missing your avatars. I have removed remote avatars and changed the upload method so they are now loaded locally instead of further PHP and mysql calls.
I am pretty much at the absolute limit of the Tuning I can do with PHP and MYSQL with the forums and now have to go back and revisit a lot of my code for things like the news and tipping etc and bring those queries down. I will also look at merging a lot of CSS and JS. This should also bring down a few overheads and http requests there fore speeding up each page load on the forums and front page.
I will continue to do profiling over the next few weeks and try to speed the site up as much as possible as it has gradually gotten slower and slower over the past few months for various reasons. We also have a fair bit of data in the site itself which also doesn't help.
I will also start testing some new forum software, both IPB and Vbulletin, both come at a cost of between $145 and $200 USD but I think that purchase will be worth it if it enhances the overall site and it's speed. The general plan will be some fresh installs of the forums and the website and then merging over the data.
It's a long process but in order for us to keep the site loading in reasonable times it is something we will have to do.
Cheers
Dan
