I need a vbmechanic and server person

[Erin]

Yeah, I know there's another vbmechanic.

I'm having trouble with my forum and server, and I don't have the time to get under the hood to figure out what's wrong. Basically, the server is crashing all the time, so the forum is getting a lot of time-out errors. I tend to have 100-200 users online at a time right now.

I'm looking for a reasonably-priced and trustworthy person (someone who's been around a bit). Any recommendations? Or takers?

I have a dedicated server with theplanet, and they're telling me that part of the problem is the size of my logs, so one of the first steps I'll try is deleting some of the old logs.

[MrGeeK]

Large logs files can definately be a problem (everytime your stats programs runs it consumes a large amount CPU and memory). Trim them back and rotate them often.

Also consider running your stats program more often, I wound mine down to every couple of hours so there wasn't a large log file to process once a day.

Another thing that might help a little is turning on persistant connections between your forum and the db. It doesn't help a great deal (except on big forums) but creating and tearing down a db connection is an "expensive" process.

Do you know if the time the server crashes is fairly consistent? Eg 4-5am. If it is fairly consistent are there other resource intensive processes running at that time, eg backups.


HTH,

[Erin]

Okay, deleting a 350 MB log file seems to have helped a lot. But I may still need some help in the future, so if anybody offers these services, please post here or PM me if you need to.

Thanks, MrGeek.

[MrGeeK]

Just yell if you want me to have a look at your server for you.

[Erin]

Well, the main problem I'm having, and it's still happening right now, is that I often can't make any new posts. Somehow vB hangs during the process in both IE and FF. In IE, I get the "The page cannot be displayed" error (yes, I have friendly error messages turned off). In FF, I just get a blank page.

If it helps, the page it displays after failing to post is:

../forums/newthread.php

I've got a bunch of hacks installed, and I also have a hardware firewall on my server, which I think might be causing the problem.

Edit: I run another, less-hacked vB on the same server, and it doesn't give me these problems.

[Erin]

Just yell if you want me to have a look at your server for you.

Can you tell me or link to your background/experience? Not that I don't trust you, but if I'm going to hand over the keys to the house... Well, I just want to know who's looking after the baby.

[MrGeeK]

hmmm how do I answer this one?

Done a few jobs on for people on SPF, probably the hardest was fixing vtctalk.com so it functioned again. (it's a vb forum and the new owner received it with a corrupt DB, it had been down for 4-5 months by the time I got my hands on it, had it back up and running within a few days)

The only way I can think of that I can fix the trust issue is if we both know the same person, now while I 'know' a lot of the SPF people who migrated I wouldn't ever ask them to vouch for me because I would never vouch for someone myself who I had only talked to a few times.

My background is in sys admin, mainly Linux but also work with Windows, AS/400's, various flavours of UNIX, and a long time ago I worked with IBM big iron (System 370 gear), I've just spent a year of my life organising linux.conf.au (http://www.linux.conf.au/) (2006) which is one of the 3 leading grassroots Linux conferences.

If your really concerned thats no probs.