2 Servers 1 Database 1 Site Need Advice

Hi

my forum is pretty large, its not large in the fact that it gets lots of posts coz its not really a posting forum

and i only have 25k ish members

but before you say this isnt big then read on!

i run a tv site and have stream authentication linked to the forum database, when it his peak times the sql always bloudy crashes! im on a p4 dedicated with 2gb ram. bla bla.

peak time i get about 700-900 people online at 1 time

i need help! i want to move onto 2 servers, will this help with the database crashing due to overload? How do i run vbulletin off 2 servers? i cant find any guides :'(

PLEASE HELP!!!

[Ntfu2]

Upgrade your ram in your current machine to 4gb. What type of hard drives do you have? SCSI w/RAID or something else?

Next order up another server, give it SCSI drives Raid setup would be best, about 6-8gb of ram.

Then simply move your database from your current machine to your new one. Edit the config.php file where it has the master DB info. Input te IP address of your new server and thats all there is to it

[flfooty tv]

do i not need to do anything with cookie settings or anything?

[orban]

Are you sure the vBulletin is the problem and not the streaming? Where is the streaming from? Same server?

A rather tiny forum like yours that just uses vB for authentication surely doesn't need 4GB RAM (I assume the database is rather small and can probably fit in 1GB RAM) nor would you need SCSI because again, everything is in memory.

Is it only vB running on that server?

[flfooty tv]

no, i have 3 seperate stream servers.

The problem lies that the authentication authenticates 1 user at a time, at peak with have few thousand viewers, it ques them if there all trying at same time and it puts alot of load on the server. and the database stops responding. i have put the web files on 1 server and database on another 1 right, but people saying they keep having to log in everytime they visit or sumtimes wen they change to another page.

Any ideas?

[orban]

The only thing they do is logging in and then for example viewing the forum home? Or are they redirected straight ahead?

You should be able to handle basically any number of logins, because all a log in does is like a handful of queries.

Have you submitted your server to http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=14 and explained your situation (peeks with insane numbers of users) and got yourself a optimized mysql config?

[flfooty tv]

no the login que is sent from icecast scripts. well i dont know how it works exactly but i do know it puts so much load on the server and causes database to crash.

anyway more my worry about running 2 servers is that it logs most users out on every page :S they login come back to another link 5 mins later and there logged out again :S

how can i sort that?

[orban]

Okay, what is icecast and how does it relate to vBulletin?

EDIT: I checked their website, and you pass the username/pw from icecast to vB to authenticate? How do you pass it?

[flfooty tv]

i have codec it so certain usergroups get access to the stream, i.e paid users

its been fine for 2 years but now the streams are extremely busy it causes crashout. but i can sort that with better server

my worry is with cookie problem running 2 servers they keep getin logged out.

any idea how i can sort it?

[orban]

You can use a load balancer for example.

I don't quite understand why you come here and ask for help but refuse to actually explain what your problem is.

You ask "i want to move onto 2 servers, will this help with the database crashing due to overload?" but don't explain WHAT actually the bottleneck is. You say you run vBulletin then you tell me you run Icecast with vB as an authentication service. How is this bridged? Maybe your implementation is the bottle neck, an easy edit of the script can fix that. Maybe your apache/php/mysql config files are the bottle neck, again an easy edit can fix it.

Adding more memory certainly will NOT help the issue because your database size isn't even 2gb. Are you swapping during those peeks?

Checking if a given user/pw combination is correct and if a user is in a given usergroup is ONE (1) SELECT query on the user table, you can probably run 500/second of those on your server (if that's the only thing it does).