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PHP/CGI speed issues

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geehawk
Rising Star
Posts: 98
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Registered: ‎07-07-2016

PHP/CGI speed issues

I notice from a couple of other posts that changes were made to PHP that potentially affected the serving of pages.

On my space I had a very old version of phpbb running, just to use the private messaging system between 2 people.

Last week (I now know due to the changes) it stopped working with the #500 error. I faffed around for a bit with htaccess files, but was not really sure of what I was doing, so bit the bullet and installed the latest version of phpbb. 

All worked great pretty much straight away, but I have noticed that the response times are really slow. Like a few seconds to switch between pages.

I'm unable to ascertain whether this is due to my connection (not great but other sites load quickly enough), the latest phpbb version ( again other sites using this software load okay) or the server being particularly slow … or a combination of some or all of the above.

 

Anyone have any advice, bearing in mind I'm not really sure how it all works I just install the package, follow instructions and cross my fingers!

9 REPLIES 9
spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
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Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Was this a completely fresh install with a new database? Or did you upgrade (and from what version)?

Using a well known Internet search engine didn't bring up any slowness clues, apart from PHPBB3 performance is slower with small databases. Caching of pages seems to be important.

David
geehawk
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Registered: ‎07-07-2016

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Thanks for the response.

 

It was a completely fresh install, brand new database.

I couldn't find much on searching, but if performance is slow with small databases then that will be an issue given the small number of users. As I say it's just a couple of people, using the private messaging system to keep in contact rather than email, been using the old version successfully for years although I do feel that too had slowed down of late...

I did try this https://tools.pingdom.com/

and over a few runs it reported times for the first page to load from 7 - 12 seconds … only slower than 10% of sites apparently! Feels an eternity.

Guess I'll keep hunting.

EDIT: Other user has just reported it's slow for him too, so I guess that rules out my connection.

 

 

spraxyt
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Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

I have an old PHPBB 3.0.5 installation once used for update process testing which no longer works. I'll replace that with a fresh install and see how it performs for me.

David
spraxyt
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Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

@geehawk

I removed the software and database tables for my old PHPBB 3.0.5 installation then did a fresh install of PHPBB 3.2.2, This is with PHP 7.1.15 run as the default Apache module. There were no problems with the install and I now have a forum with just the one admin user, one category, one board and one "welcome" post.

I enabled the PHPBB_DISPLAY_LOAD_TIME constant in config.php to display page load times in the footer. Stepping between the Board index, first forum index and view post, then reversing shows page load times from 3 to 3.5 seconds. How does this compare with your experience?

David
geehawk
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Posts: 98
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Registered: ‎07-07-2016

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Thanks for doing this.

I just checked and I'm getting similar times at the moment, except when entering the ACP it took 10s and to load the board initially from URL ( ccgi.geehawk.force9.co.uk/twinnies/ ), although the time shown is in the 3s region, it is much longer than that, well over 10s on average...

Wonder if me having no categories, boards or posts is causing a problem? I'll have to create some and test. I deleted the default ones as they were not required.

 

Again, thanks for taking the time.

Graham

spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
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Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Fix

Entering my forum ACP or MCP generally took the usual 3 to 3.5 seconds for me. However when changing tabs in the MCP on one occasion it took over 13 seconds and said that on the page. This was to display the moderation list (which is empty and had been viewed before). Repeating that tab change several times gave the normal 3 second response. This leads me to conclude that delay was simply what one gets from time to time on shared hosting, possibly on the MySQL server on this occasion.

Loading my board URL takes 7 or 8 seconds though 3+ seconds shows on the page. For your forum it was 10 to 11 seconds. This is just a guess but the extra could be the overhead of establishing a connection to the server in Ireland and setting up a session.

I had a look at my database tables using Adminer; this showed no significant amount of wasted space.

David
geehawk
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Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Ah well, it's not the end of the world for something that just used by a couple of people.

We can live with it.

 

Thanks again for taking the time.

 

Graham

geehawk
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Registered: ‎07-07-2016

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Just to update this a little.

This morning from entering URL to board loading took about 3s, and each change of page within the forum, including ACP panel and navigating tabs is taking around 0.3s ….

So it is capable of running much faster, fingers crossed it stays like it Crazy2

spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
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Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: PHP/CGI speed issues

Yes, performance does seem operationally variable today, sometimes fast (0.2s), sometimes normal (3s) when I carry out similar things to yesterday. Perhaps the power users have headed off early for the Bank Holiday. Grin

David