maximum memory allowance, what to do? upgade?

Hello im going to try to explain everything so I can get some good awnsers, please help me!!!

I run a forum, that is bacially all I have on my server, i have the crazy domain insane package and am only using 1% of my bandwitdth and disk space. But I get the Internal Server Error.

I contacted dreamhost and they said this:

It is not about bandwidth. So I think upgrading your plan won't help too much.

I'll suggest you to ask DH to move you to another server.

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I'll suggest you to ask DH to move you to another server.

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I don't think moving to another server will help at all, as the original poster is hitting the user memory limit and this limit is likely to be the same on all servers.

Also, I don't think installing a custom PHP will help either, as it is doesn't seem to be the PHP memory limit being exceeded, but rather a global user memory limit.

The only thing I can think of that might help would be to strip your forum of any plug-ins etc. that may be causing excessive memory usage. If this doesn't help, then perhaps it's time to start looking for alternative forum software.

Mark

Well I dont have really any plugins that would be using memory in my opinion? Would diffrent themes or ability of people attaching images to posts effect this greatly? The software doesnt take much room at all and is very basic, see for your self http://www.sn95forums.com/forum

Some users do have the similiar problem. The process were killed due to heavy cpu usage. Sometimes some users are runny too many heavy processes on the same server.

It was solved after DH moved the user toanother server which has more availabel cpu and memory.

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It was solved after DH moved the user toanother server which has more availabel cpu and memory.

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I don't think it's a matter of the server not having enough RAM, or the amount of RAM being used by others on the server, it's simply that the user is hitting a hard limit imposed by DreamHost for user memory usage (100MB?). Note this line from the DreamHost correspondence above;

"It looks like you're hitting our user memory limit. We limit the amount of total memory any one user can use at a time:"

The only way to prevent this is to reduce the memory consumed by the forum.

Mark

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I dont have really any plugins that would be using memory in my opinion

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It's hard to say how much memory would be consumed by a particular plug-in, a lot will depend on what the plug-in actually does and how efficiently it is coded.

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Would diffrent themes or ability of people attaching images to posts effect this greatly?

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Once again, it's hard to say. Does the image plug-in dynamically resize images? If so, then this could conceivably consume large amounts of memory.

I would suggest disabling all plug-ins at first, just to see if this rectifies the problem. If it does, you can add them back one at a time until the problem re-occurs.

Mark

I agree with "The only way to prevent this is to reduce the memory consumed by the forum."
Just had a look through the sn95 forums, and each forum section alone takes a rather long time to process.

My personal recommendation would be to find another forum software (hopefully something you can transfer painlessly to) and use that. I'm unfamiliar with the SMF Forum software, so I can't recommend any modifications, though that's not to say it isn't possible.

Well thats because the server is slow as hell lately, I think its a server problem my self because its been slowing down and getting these errors. Lots of people run SMF and have no problem its probaly the best free message board out there.

It seems to have only had these errors the past week, and every day, every hour it seems to get worse and worse.
About a month ago the forums were getting about 50% more members then they are now and we didnt have a single problem either.

Im reading in the wiki and it talks about Custom PHP5 and it says "Added --enable memory limit as the reason that most want to compile their is because they want to change the memory limit in php.ini"

Think that could help?

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Think that could help?

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As I said above, I don't think increasing the PHP memory limit will help, as it doesn't appear that you are hitting the PHP memory limit, but rather a limit imposed by DreamHost on your users total memory usage across all processes.

Mark

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Well thats because the server is slow as hell lately, I think its a server problem my self because its been slowing down and getting these errors. Lots of people run SMF and have no problem its probaly the best free message board out there.

It seems to have only had these errors the past week, and every day, every hour it seems to get worse and worse.
About a month ago the forums were getting about 50% more members then they are now and we didnt have a single problem either.

Im reading in the wiki and it talks about Custom PHP5 and it says "Added --enable memory limit as the reason that most want to compile their is because they want to change the memory limit in php.ini"

Think that could help?

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How about a few specifics? How many members do you have, how many messages per day, and how many simultaneous users? The latter could be the deal-breaker. If you have lots of images on that site being uploaded and downloaded by visitors, that could also be a reason for excessive resource usage. I have SMF on two of my sites, but they are strictly light traffic.


Peace,
Gene Steinberg
Co-Host, The Paracast
http://www.theparacast.com

If you can SSH into your server and check the current load (specifically at a time when your site is having issues), that would tell you almost for sure whether or not it's a server problem. I recently reported welchs as having rather high load and the staff took care of it immediately.

Anyways, the only reason you personally might wish to compile your own version of PHP(5), would be to utilize a caching program like eAccelerator or APC memcache. That would certainly cut down on some of your overall memory usage. Though if the server is reporting that you're hitting your limit, I still think it's an issue with the forum software itself.
A simple configuration error, mis-configured/installed mod, or just an issue with the older version you're running could all be reasons for this - not because the software itself would normally cause it.

I've used SMF before, my general impression is it's slow. Try using MyBBoard (http://mybboard.com/) or Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com/), i've had great experiences with those... PunBB also tends to have good performance also.

If you can SSH into your server and check the current load (specifically at a time when your site is having issues), that would tell you almost for sure whether or not it's a server problem. I recently reported welchs as having rather high load and the staff took care of it immediately.

How do I do this? And my site has about 100members tops on it per time, not many images downloaded 90% of them are hosting on their own imagehosting like image shack.

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If you can SSH into your server and check the current load (specifically at a time when your site is having issues) ... How do I do this?

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From the shell prompt, type "w" or "uptime" and hit the return/enter key (no quotes).

--rlparker

sorry but whats the shell prompt?

Ok here is some info that might help. I went into phpMyAdmin for my forums and did some reading.

Here are some values that were highlighted in RED which im assuming is bad:

VARIABLE: Slow_queries
VALUE: 76 k
Description: The number of queries that have taken more than long_query_time seconds.

VARIABLE: Handler_read_rnd
VALUE: 129 k
Description: The number of requests to read a row based on a fixed position. This is high if you are doing a lot of queries that require sorting of the result. You probably have a lot of queries that require MySQL to scan whole tables or you have joins that don't use keys properly.

VARIABLE: Handler_read_rnd_next
VALUE: 15 M
Description: The number of requests to read the next row in the data file. This is high if you are doing a lot of table scans. Generally this suggests that your tables are not properly indexed or that your queries are not written to take advantage of the indexes you have.

VARIABLE:
Created_tmp_disk_tables
VALUE: 1 k
Description: The number of temporary tables on disk created automatically by the server while executing statements. If Created_tmp_disk_tables is big, you may want to increase the tmp_table_size value to cause temporary tables to be memory-based instead of disk-based.

now these last two below caught my eye most of all....

VARIABLE:
Select_full_join
VALUE: 155
Description: The number of joins that do not use indexes. If this value is not 0, you should carefully check the indexes of your tables.

VARIABLE: Table_locks_waited
VALUE: 286
Description: The number of times that a table lock could not be acquired immediately and a wait was needed. If this is high, and you have performance problems, you should first optimize your queries, and then either split your table or tables or use replication.

You may wish to check the wiki links provided here:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Shell

More than likely you'll need to 'Enable Shell Access' first, and then go from there. It's really quite simple, and I recommend PuTTy for connecting to your shell.

That's about all the help I can offer you on this issue.
Hopefully you figure it out, or someone else can take over