Too many write requests?

[Jennifer2010]

Hi everyone -

My server is suffering from very high load due to my vBulletin 4.2.0 forum.

It's taken a while to narrow down why this is happening and this is the response I received from my host:

First off, the slowness issue is due to excessive disk i/o.
Looking into this further, I can say that definitely the issue is that the server is doing about 1000 write requests / second.
Most likely, either your forum software is directly writing to the drive, or, is making a large number of mysql queries that are writing to the disk, or there is some error in your software that is spamming the error log. It's not clear to me at this point exactly what is going on or how to fix it, but I hope that this information can help you narrow it down.

I'm not sure where to go from here thus why I'm here seeing if anyone can make any recommendations.

Dedicated Server specs:

* X3460 CPU
* 16Gb ram
* 2x1TB drives in software raid 1
* 100mbps port
* Centos 5.8 64 bit
* Standard partitioning (4gb swap, 100mb /boot, remainder /)
* Cpanel / WHM

Forum specs:Version 4.2.0 Patch Level 2
Custom theme
5,000 active members. With 15 minute cookie, there are 120 members and 68 guests online.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[nhawk]

First if everything was running without a problem when you first installed 4.2 and you've kept up to date with the updates, you can eliminate a problem there right away. But to be sure, I'd disable all mods/add-ons to see if the load drops. If it does, turn them back on one by one to see if the load goes back up. If it does, you found the culprit.

Second, check your site logs for IP addresses banging away at vB trying to hack their way into getting an account. It will be obvious which ones they are because the log entries will all have 'do=addmember' in them and there will be a ton of them all in a row. If there are a slew of them, and they are continuous you need to block that IP from accessing your site.

Third, server load can be affected by so many other things besides vB that many times it takes some detective work to find the problem.

Some examples are continuous email hack attempts, DOS attacks, SSH hack attempts, FTP hack attempts, disk swaps, raid errors, bad memory chips and a bunch of other things. All of which require looking at the server logs to find what is causing the load. And all of which could cause high disk write rates on a server when they write to the logs.

[final kaoss]

You should make a post here.

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/14-Server-Configuration

The vbulletin staff themselves will whip up some kind of solution for you.

Hi everyone -

My server is suffering from very high load due to my vBulletin 4.2.0 forum.

It's taken a while to narrow down why this is happening and this is the response I received from my host:





I'm not sure where to go from here thus why I'm here seeing if anyone can make any recommendations.

Dedicated Server specs:

* X3460 CPU
* 16Gb ram
* 2x1TB drives in software raid 1
* 100mbps port
* Centos 5.8 64 bit
* Standard partitioning (4gb swap, 100mb /boot, remainder /)
* Cpanel / WHM

Forum specs:Version 4.2.0 Patch Level 2
Custom theme
5,000 active members. With 15 minute cookie, there are 120 members and 68 guests online.

Any help is greatly appreciated!