Chris`I

This is the same session issue. You open the index when the forum is fine, but when you return it is fubard. The reason you cant get past clicking the first link is it tries to see what your session is, but as that is locked out, you cant go anywhere. Sessions are the lynchpin of the forum and when they are locked out no one can access the forum - not even mods and admin. We know the change to make, but its akin to tuning your car yourself - we need to know what we are doing first time round so it doesnt break the whole thing for everyone

This is why I waited for a Black Edition 370z - anthracite wheels dont really show brake dust. My old gold Rota's were a nightmare I do find with Poorboys wheel sealant if you do the wheels when clean, it makes them very easy to clean in the future. Just use water and LSP safe shampoo (Dodo, megs, etc)

The sessions table as you can imagine is like the gatekeeper to the forum. Before you can do anything (log in, view thread, post, create PMs), it goes to the sessions table to see what your status is. Due to the design of MyISAM, anything that changes in that table locks the whole thing, not only to other writes but also reads. You can see how this can be quite catastrophic then when it decides to lock for anything more than a few seconds, literally no one can do anything. InnoDb removes this and things should run a lot smoother. WRT to the backend design, not a lot we can do with that, its phpBB's remit. But going by fact there are bigger forums out there using it, we should be ok. They are all using InnoDB which shows us its the right way to go

Think there have been quite a few people over the years from here. Do a quick search and you should find a few threads. I think the general concensus is

No offence taken - we know we're not that big compared to some other forums out there. I have worked/work doing data ETL/warehousing for some of the worlds biggest telco's and payment processors so know what truely massive volumes look like What we do know is that the number of people trying to log on at once causes a sessions table to lock up, which InnoDB will fix. This is not helped by a problem that may be lingering in the chat mod too which I need to look at tonight. We should be fine moving over to InnoDB alone. Its what phpBB forums themselves use and as you say, we're not a big forum in that sense, so its just the table locking that is the issue. We know there is plenty of disk IO and CPU left to spare. InnoDB has the problem that it doesnt support full text searching so we cant move all tables without very big modifications to the forum, but the tables effected fortunately arent searched, so we are ok. All thats really happened is that we've grown too big/busy for MyISAM engine which is the MySQL default.

That sounds about right - its in the service manual ( http://www.nicoclub.com/FSM/ ). You'd certainly want to loosen off the handbrake lever end before adjusting the back

Do you know much about MySQL and MyISAM/InnoDB? I know a lot of DBAs in my field of work but they are all DB2 and Oracle based being that they work for big firms. The problems we are looking at are tuning these to the size that the forum has now become. MySQL is good out the box for small forums, but as we have so many people logging on at once now its becoming overwhelmed (not a hardware issue) with table locking. We're moving table(s) over to InnoDB as we think this will solve it FWIW the forum isnt acutally crashing, its hitting near deadlock as tables become locked and all queries are queued behind it. This queue eventually gets so long that the server takes a long time to recover. Google/Bing bots live on here and make lots of requests which make the queue grow very quickly too. Its not a hardware issue as the server has loads of resource left, its an internal bottleneck of MySQL and MyISAM.

Thanks Vik

No there isnt anything wrong with that. But expecting people to give up all their time to solve the problem is. We do this part time as and when we can and we do our best. We ask for as much info as possible to help us find out what is going wrong. You want me to spend a few days and fix it - you pay my day rate and I'll do it - though the invoice might make you cry. Thanks for the info Vik - moving in the right direction

This has been done

nightmare.... lol! can you change my old one to WINKJ? got sick of having a boring username. I'll have to delete this user, so give me 10mins and try logging in again and it should hook up to the old login (ie use the old password if its different). You may need to clear your cookies as it might try and log in as your current user. I'll email you when done

If you ask nicely we can change usernames

So you're the cause of our problems huh? If people on at the time of the "crash" can post up info such as date/time plus what they were doing at the time and how long the outage was for then we can do something about it. For the record its not actually crashing, we're not restarting anything, something is just overloading it momentarily. Could be a bot, could be chat, theres a lot of variables to work through. Chat will most likely be disabled tonight to see if that solves it.

Think you are right Dave, you get the same on most body panels but the filler cap is the worse. They'll be sprayed seperately so the flecks line up at a different angle which means they reflect the light differently to the body and thus give off a different colour. Its a lot more noticeable to cameras for some reason.

Is the forum still locking out for people on a night? If so please can you use this thread to detail what you were doing at the time, in chat for example or just browsing the forum. Date and time is especially important. As this site doesnt have full time moderators/admins it is very hard for us to nail down problems like this especially if they are assocaited to an unsupported mod like chat, which we may just have to remove/replace. Traffic to the site has grown greatly over the past few months so any tuning we are doing it just holding water with the new found attention we are getting - but we will do our best to keep the site up as much as possible. We may well be moving to a managed UK host in the near future which should also help us out. To reiterate - the more details we have the better to help work out what is wrong

Would certainly help our boys

Sure they will have Hamilton back one day Dave, then we'll see the true fastest driver

OK, ta

Thanks for posting. So no updates for Connect Premium yet then?

If you are on OEM cats and Y-pipe its not worth it. If you get a free flowing Y-pipe as part of the new exhaust, it could be tempting, but personally I'd get HFCs too then have the tune with Y-pipe and HFCs

Sorry, due to F1 and other inconsiderate timings (Amanda needing it just after I got it done and not returning until this evening!), I got the car done but no pics Will get some tomorrow evening. I will say it shows Nissan how to do a proper metallic, but the paint finish isnt quite as good as Nissan in terms of perfect laying/spraying of paint as there are a few blemishes. Its wonderful to drive for a run around though, has as much torque as the 370z

Whats the current best chat protocol then? I havent used anything in years, but IRC is so simple there shouldnt be any problems with it.

At least it gets it off our server and keeps the forum running fine OR you lot just dont post big pics and everyone is happy as the forum runs fine

Looks like chat, but you have to sign in using a different client (ie not a browser but stand alone software). Thats what Chat emulates Go google it, its proper geek

Afraid its not that easy. The server has plenty of resources left. A lot of the issues stem from the fact that the database is not set up for our level of usage and needs tuning which we are working on. We could always set up a proper IRC channel if people want to use chat on an more than leisurely scale