Dear all,
Sometimes the forum displays a white page. It can happen on first connection, on a page reply. It can happen anytime. It can happen several times a day.
I have some screenshots if you would like to see them. I am running behind fiber with low-latency and no cache on my side.
Being in the past a forum admin in part-time for a very large forum, I know this could be due to:
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The use of MySQL. I don't want to enter a flame war, but MySQL is not ACID compliant and although MySQL claims it is the best database ever produced in mankind history, it really is pure and noble shit. i mean "noble" because MySQL smells goods, tastes good, but in the end ... you discover this is shit and this leavers a bad taste in your mouth.
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Cache Bloat traditional issue. Caching works on small systems. But extensive use of caching on very large sites lead to poor performance, because the system takes more time to update/manage cache than to actually deliver web pages to end-users. This is funny to see how many people believe in cache, as in reality, it kills projects and systems and more generally slows down the entire web.
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A database server running on a virtual system. Databases don't work well on systems making extensive read/write for lack of good RAM management and good filesystem management. It is a known issue and there is no working solution yet.
Traditional forums can cope with 10.000 simultaneous users without whitepage. How?
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10ms average, 30 ms maximum for each SQL query. Queries should be monitored server-side. No cache. No virtual system. A real server with plenty of RAM.
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No caching in third party servers: apache2 or a proxy or whatever. Cache is good for small applications but kills performance of large systems.
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Of course : no farm and kind of scenario where you loose control on the real issues behind poor performance.
So do you have an idea of those white pages coming from? If you don't, please disable all caching everywhere and monitor slow SQL queries (>30 ms) until you find bottleneck and fix them in code.
Kind regards,
French Fries