forum is hitting query limits
 

I logged into my hosting contorl panel this morning and had an error that my datbase is exceeding query limits. This is the message I get:

Keep in mind this forum has been online with this host for 2 days. I moved away from another host which sucked.

We have a small forum of about 500 users, and aq very small amount of those are actually participating members.

What could be causing this to happen?

Thanks!

1. Get a better host.

2. Disable some of your hacks to cut down on the queries, depending on the hack, it can add 1 or more queries per page load.

Or 3. Bring this error to the attention of the host and see if they can change the setting to up the query limit.

Well, I have brought it to their attention in a support ticket a few minutes ago but apparently from their "rules" that I've read in their forum, these are query limits they set on all acounts. Not good.

The only thing I can think is that search bots are causing the query load b/c we get a LOT of search bots and guests.

Currently I only have 5 users logged in and 41 guests, many of those guests are bots. We have had as many as 100 search engine bots crawling at one time.

Moving to this new host has increased our site performance by 62%. The query restriction limit stinks though. I went in a few minutes ago and disabled a couple of plugins but nothing I see could be causing such a high load. One of them was flashchat but it NEVER has anyone in it, so I turned it off for now. I do have google-analytics enabled. I wonder what kind of load it causes.

Thanks Lynne!
Buster

Can you put in a robots.txt file? I have one on my site so I can limit the amount of yahoo slurp spiders on there at a time. They will come en masse if allowed.

Good idea. What exactly does it need to have in it?

Will that get the MSNbots and googlebots as well?

Thanks Lynne!

This is a good thread on it - robots.txt help But, there are several to read - type "robots.txt" "titles only"

Wowser, no simple copy and paste from yo0ur robots.txt?

Blocking robots or even delaying them is a really piss poor work around for what shouldn't be a problem. You're only going to hurt your results in the search engines by doing this but if you aren't concerned with such trickery then its a non-issue at that point.

And just out of curiosity what hosting company are you using

If you do that search, then you will probably find some pre-written robots.txt files. But, you will have to look it over to see if it is a file that is fit for your site. For instance, some people will add in the members.php page, but that isn't good for sites that want to have the members page indexed. Same with online.php. You need to see if those are files you want blocked from spiders or not.

Edit: The file FRDS posted will disallow spiders from your whole site, not just some pages. Also, he uses a /forum folder and you may have to change that for your site.

Usually it is the Yahoo spider which does this, Google Spider causes less load and their search engine sends 80-90% of the total search traffic. So it is best to enable the crawl delay only for the Yahoo bot.

I'm on the same page here, I've been by now w/ I don't know how many hosting companies that usually allows only 50 MySQL connections, I've been with both small and big companies and is all the same when it comes to MySQL connections, I guess they haven't realized that we, forums, needs more. My site have a lot of traffic between members, guests and robots but I cannot find a "decent" hosting plan when it comes to MySQL queries, I guess I need at least 150.

The solution is pretty much going dedicated or virtual, but not everyone can pay that much money monthly.

What to do?.

Any help? Do you guys knows any hosting plan that allows more MySQL connections?.

Thanks. :)

A host that limits MySQL to a maximum of 10 connections, will probably never run vB without problems, not even if you have only a few visitors and disable all spiders.

forums were never really designed to run on shared hosting. I know a VPS can be expensive but if you really want to run a site and not have to worry about such silly things as MySQL connections, and time outs its the only way to go.

There are loads of shared hosts that don't have such a low limits.

I would 2nd or 3rd "getting a better host"

and I'll also 2nd Marco's comment that there are many shared host that work just fine with vBulletin.
with the low limits that your current host has is ridicules, it sounds like your being hosted by a reseller :(

If your site is getting that many visitors then it can certainly earn 40-50 bucks needed for a decent managed vps. If you are not monetizing or taking donations from members, then you have to sit down and seriously think about the future of your forum because most likely it will only grow in the future.

Btw you might want to check out a reseller plan from a host that would generally allow for much more resources, that’s what I used before switching to vps.