MyBB Community Forums

I currently moderate a MyBB 1.6.0 forum with approximately 500 members, 540,000 posts, and 10,000 threads, and today we were alerted that the database is taking up "excessive resources" on database servers.

I do realize that we should update to MyBB 1.6.1; however, I don't think that will solve the problem. The hosting company, FatCow, says that if the problem is not solved in three days, they will be forced to suspend the account.

The queries on a page rage from 10 (on the home page) to 24 (showing the posts in a thread). The forum gets anywhere from 300 to 500 posts in a day. Currently only two plugins are running, BBCode in Custom Profile Fields and one I made myself which adds user-defined formatting to their posts. We had a chatbox until today but I just disabled it.

I was wondering what I could do to reduce resources in order to keep the site online, and also if it would be better to switch to some kind of VPS hosting (which I have no experience with). I really like using MyBB but this is obviously pretty disastrous.

Thank you in advance.

Join the group here for "Big Board Owners". We have some additional threads discussing large forum optimizations. You have a few options to you.

But here is a big question. Does your host run MySQL 5.5? If so then the biggest benefit would be converting your tables to InnoDB. There are also other optimizations which could help. Fact is you're not serving a lot of pages but some of the queries could be excessive. One real problem is showthread. The new pagination dropdown is terrible imho. There is also a GROUP BY statement in the code that while fixing a bug creates a temp table in MySQL and eats resources.

And I highly recommend you upgrade to 1.6.2. You're missing out on some security related fixes as well as many bug fixes. Immediately upgrade.

Okay, I'll try doing that.

PHP Info tells me that the Mysql Client API version is 5.0.51a, so I'm afraid I don't have that option. Hopefully I'll be able to implement the other optimizations - I take it that removing pagination dropdowns and the like would file edits?

The admin of the forum has been planning to upgrade for a long time (so she can learn how to do it rather than having me upgrade it for her) but she's been busy. I don't know how many queries upgrading twice would entail, but I guess it would make sense to make changes to the newest version... I'll see what I can do.