For several days, myself and the other members of my forum were constantly getting SQL error 1203 when trying to load pages. I finally contacted my host about it tonight to see about increasing max_user_connections, but instead I ended up with my website suspended because they decided it had been creating an abnormal load on their servers. I was advised to delete or take actions against 'these files' to decrease the server load and get the suspension revoked, but upon asking what files exactly were causing the problems, they told me that /forum/showthread.php was the file causing the majority of the problems.
. . . so basically, can anyone offer advice on how exactly to fix this problem? Would deleting old threads help at all? Is there even a way to improve the load that this is causing, or is better hosting my best bet?
Don't delete threads, its not a solution.
Can you list out here what plugins you do use? And also enable the debug mode which would be shown on footer (only to admin) and check on any thread how many queries, PHP, MySQL processes takes place and let us know.
I didn't really think so, but I thought it couldn't hurt to see about it.
I can't check the plugins or queries and processes or change settings because the website is suspended as I noted above. I mean, I can access things through the control panel of the hosting company, but . . . I don't have my admin panel within the forum itself. If there's a way I can do any of that without complete access to the forum, I'd gladly do it, but I admit I'm not completely sure how, either.
I do remember that most of the query numbers before the site got suspended ranged from 18 to 24 or so, but I can't say anything more than that for the time being.
What are your forum statistics, and how many users are online on average? Any decent shared host can handle a fair amount of traffic.
On average we've been getting from 60-70 visitors at a time, about half of them usually guests. I tried to get statistics from within my control panel on the hosts' site, but I didn't find a way to get to any sort of forum statistics from there.
As said above, plugins are the usual cause of a problem like this. You should also disable the navigation mutlipage and the forum jump list (both of which add extra queries). As nathan said, decent shared hosts should be able to handle that kind of traffic just fine. Which hosting company are you with?
Mmh, okay. I'll try to see if the hosts will let me get back into the website so I can actually look into disabling unnecessary plugins and following these other recommendations, then. Thank you all for the advice! And I'm with Fatcow.
Ask your host to unsuspend you for a while by telling them you need to get debug information and queries from ACP to know the reason behind load and they should maybe unsuspend you for a while.
All right, my site is up again. My plugins are Akismet, Custom Pages, BBCode in Custom Profile Fields, Hello World!, Login Password Conversion, NewPoints, Better Postcount Converter, SpiceFuse Shoutbox, Spoiler BBCode, User BBCodes, and Posts Wordcount, although the only ones actually enabled right now are BBCode in Custom Profile Fields, Spoiler BBCode, and User BBCodes.
I checked into the debug information, and here are some of the results it gave me on various threads:
Generated in 0.4574389 seconds (83.80% PHP / 16.20% MySQL)
SQL Queries: 24
Generated in 0.2474420 seconds (84.28% PHP / 15.72% MySQL)
SQL Queries: 28
Generated in 0.3328128 seconds (80.61% PHP / 19.39% MySQL)
SQL Queries: 28
Generated in 0.6379340 seconds (50.48% PHP / 49.52% MySQL)
SQL Queries: 28
Generated in 2.2117889 seconds (97.89% PHP / 2.11% MySQL)
SQL Queries: 22
Statistics are as follows:
Totals
Posts: 835,306
Threads: 14,281
Members: 1,395
Averages
Posts per day: 774.21
Threads per day: 13.24
Members per day: 1.29
Posts per member: 598.79
Replies per thread: 57.49
Forum jump is already disabled, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where to disable the navigation multipage if I haven't already.
You should consider joining the Big Board Owner group on these forums. You more than qualified to join.
http://community.mybb.com/usercp.php?action=usergroups
Also, with 835K posts it might be time to move to a VPS or dedicated server. I think the main issue is you've outgrown your current host.