MyBB Community Forums

I started a board a few years back and abandoned it, it was then taken over by spammers and accumulated between 10-20,000 spam posts across about 8 forums.

Now I want to revitalise this forum and there are a few posts and users that I want to retain as well as settings.

So to fix this without having to rebuild the forum, when I try to delete the users and forums, it takes a long while loading and then gives an internal server error.

My server is a dedicated box that has fairly good spec, definitely should be able to handle this kind of task.

Any advice please?

Can you give the internal server error please?

Internal Server Error 500

Generic server fail Are you able to delete the users one by one? Same for the threads (I am not saying that is the solution, but it helps to narrow things down).

Do the server logs say anything in more detail about the internal server error?

I just deleted a user with 5.5k spam posts, I assume this didn't delete his posts with him, right?

It seems MyBB is unable to do anything 'strenuous', but really as a large popular forum system this should be working?

Also, what logs do I check? In the error_log file in the admin directory I have this one line:

[09-Apr-2013 22:35:22 America/Denver] PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8458 bytes) in /home/nkforums/public_html/inc/db_mysql.php on line 419

Not sure if that's related.

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The CPU usage also soars when I try to delete a forum with several thousand posts in. I have a pretty decent spec and host about 5 other active websites on the server.

What you could try doing is looking at this

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/777/solve...ted-tried/

And just temporarily increase the amount of memory allocated then once you have deleted lots of forums and posts put the memory back down.

I've boosted it to 128mb but has the same error and the CPU went to 56.94 (8 CPUs) according to WHM. I'll try higher.

The way MyBB does pruning is terrible. I often have to just use mysql cli instead. Unsure what's not optimized but I know it's not. Takes forever to delete a user with posts or merge them.

I've increased it further to 512mb and seems to be working now, but it's very clunky. Takes a while and sends my CPU load sky high. I think this needs addressing urgently, because other forum systems that I've used have never had this issue.