The 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open. Your response will help shape the future of the Drupal business ecosystem.Hey all:
We're running a client site - 3 front end web tiers, dedicated m/s db for Drupal, and a separate dedicated DB instance for the forum.
Despite memcached on phpbb3 via the available patch, we're still finding that the phpbb3 database server is getting overloaded. It's only got 500k rows in session (less than a month), and the site is approaching rocket speed (it uses solid state storage and cdn offload). Since we've moved it to this platform, we're started seeing the db server get overloaded (presumably, we've moved the bottleneck). Of course, this causes havoc as it affects the performance of not only the forums, but also the site itself (Drupal) slows to a crawl. The only thing coming through are the session inserts/selects (mostly selects), which is normal.
It's not running anything special, and the infrastructure isn't breaking a sweat. When it happens, we only see 3-5 processes in wait state, and the db is tuned properly (not only on manual review, output of both mysql tuner scripts is fine, even after multi-week runs).
I'm at a loss as to how to fix it. I really don't like the deep integration, as it's really troublesome to have to ping both dbs for both platforms on every bootstrap request - it definitely consumes resources.
Has someone else experienced this problem or similar? Any takers?
Also, is there a way to remove the deeper integration and simply run linked profiles on request? I'd like to make the integration much more lightweight, but only see mentions in the issue queue and other threads and nothing similar is in the open issue queue (on either the performance or lightweight integration issue) that I could find.
I have also tried various versions of the module - same result. This is a D6 site obviously.
Thanks very much.
Comments
Comment #1
gmustuk commentedI wanted to let you know that yesterday I disabled the phpbb hidden authentication block with hopes that this would resolve the issue. This block is what would have shown on every drupal page, so my thinking was that If I removed the block it wouldn't be using phpbb module for all the drupal pages. It doesn't appear to have done anything. The block has been removed now without any noticeable changes in the website. I decided to do some more drastic testing to see what I might find.
I spent the past hour or so doing some more comprehensive testing and here is what I found.
In order to have a more even comparison I tested using pages at: http://www.sikhnet.com/ang/110 Incrementing the number at the end of the URL for each test. I used a stop watch to time how long it took for the page to load. I first did a series of about 10 tests with the phpbbforum module enabled and then with it disabled. I did quite a few sets of tests with it enabled and disabled to rule out flukes or coincidental/temporary server load differences. It became clear after many sets of tests that it was consistently changing load time speeds with the module either enabled or disabled.
All the tests were done logged in with a basic authenticated user account which has basic access to the website (no special/admin access).
What I found was that with Phpbbforum module enabled the pages took between 15-26 seconds to load. With an average of about 17 seconds overall.
As soon as I disabled the module the page load times sped up dramatically. The page load time WITHOUT phpbbforum module enabled was between 6-15 seconds with an average of about 9 seconds.
I'm glad that we are getting closer to solving this problem. I guess now the question I will want to ask Vadim is why the phpbbforum module would create this much load time on all drupal pages without the hidden authentication block enabled.
So, at this point my question to any of you is do you have any idea why this module would cause this type of slow down?
Ps. I have phpbb configured with the "phpBB display way:" as "In the window" with most of the default settings.
Comment #2
fizk commented