[InfidelMatt]

Originally Posted by Paul M

How big is your forum, because we don't have any issues with searches - also which search method do you use ? Do you allow guests to search ?

As 99Percent hasn't responded yet, I will (I help manage the same server).

Our forum has 3.5 million posts with 3000 or so active members, 300-500 constants. We use fulltext searching. We don't allow guests to search. Our post table is in the neighborhood of 3GB.



Here is our problem: Our load averages are just fine, but when someone runs an advanced search, it locks the entire post table for a bit and apache soon hits the max connections limit as a bunch of requests are waiting due to the locked table.

This graph explains better:



As you can see, everything is just fine until someone runs a search requiring the entire post table to be locked (Blue: apache connections).

A big portion of the problem is our hardware. We are unfortunately on IDE non-raided drives so things don't move as fast as they should.

Until we resolve the hardware issues, having a slave DB on the same server will allow for searches locking the post table (now of the slave DB) while not slowing down or outright stopping those accessing the master post table nor overwhelming Apache.

We'll try the alias method recommended above. Thanks.

Matt