What is an Active member?
- Thread starter snowhiker
- Start date
The way we have it configured here at SF is as follows:
Active Members Time Cut-Off
Enter a number of days here that represents a threshold for 'active' members. If a user has visited the board within the past number of days you specify, they are considered 'active'.
Our value is 30 days but any other forum using vbulletin can change it to whatever they want.
Active Members Time Cut-Off
Enter a number of days here that represents a threshold for 'active' members. If a user has visited the board within the past number of days you specify, they are considered 'active'.
Our value is 30 days but any other forum using vbulletin can change it to whatever they want.
Gotcha.
So only 31 people (who are logged in) visit this site per month?!? Seems low, but perhaps people are not bothering to log in. So site usage is very unlikely to be the cause of the occasional slow performance or internet server errors.
Yeah that doesn't tell the entire story. There are plenty who don't log in and also thousands of denied spam registration attempts. There is also lots of traffic from spiders over the month. This server also hosts more than just this site. All combined though, it shouldn't be so much to cause us performance problems like this. I need to really spend some time figuring out where the problems are.
Interesting. And it makes sense that this site doesn't have its own physical server as you have to keep costs down as there is zero revenue generated here.
Perhaps one of the other sites that share the same physically server is misbehaving, but I'd guess that's out of your control.
Anyways don't spend too much time/energy as I can live with a very occasionally "slow" site, or an internal server error every once in a while. Now the multi-quote issue is kind of a PITA and I'd rather have that bug squished than the occasional server slowdowns.
Thanks again for the time/effort/resources to keep the site up and running.
The way this site is hosted is through a VPS (Virtual Private Server) service. There is a single beefy system that partitions the resources between several customers. Within each VPS container, a customer is free to sub-divide those resources to one or more hosting account. I'm even allowed to over-provision my allotment. For example, I get allocated a certain amount of CPU, RAM, Disk, and bandwidth. When I say that there are multiple sites hosted, it is a slightly loaded statement. From my resources I'm hosting 5-6 websites. On the physical system as a whole, it could be much more than this. I have no insight to how many are on this server. It could be possible the server has been out-grown.
I chose the VPS because it was easier to manage SF with root access in my container. Their service is a managed VPS so I can go to them for help when I get stuck. The database backups are larger than most shared hosting providers can mange through their automation scripts (they typically time out).
I'd like to figure this out so that it stops interrupting the small number of us who visit regularly. I'd even prefer to have a dedicated server but it's just not economical to do so. I appreciate you mentioning the issue rather than just living with it.
I chose the VPS because it was easier to manage SF with root access in my container. Their service is a managed VPS so I can go to them for help when I get stuck. The database backups are larger than most shared hosting providers can mange through their automation scripts (they typically time out).
I'd like to figure this out so that it stops interrupting the small number of us who visit regularly. I'd even prefer to have a dedicated server but it's just not economical to do so. I appreciate you mentioning the issue rather than just living with it.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
I looked into it a while back but thought the cost wasn't great for what I got. It may be worth me revisiting it now. Can I host my own MySQL on the medium instance in lieu of using the AWS RDS? If so that works fine. If not, I could use a smaller EC2 instance and pay for the RDS. It looks like if I paid for an m3.medium upfront for a year, it would be $372...which is cheaper than I'm paying now. I don't understand though if there would be additional costs in addition to that? I'll play around with their free instances and see if I can put up a temp version of SF for people to access and see how it functions.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
You can install anything on your instance. So, yes, you can install MariaDB or MySQL.
Amazon RDS has some benefits over running/managing your own DB server.
Amazon RDS has some benefits over running/managing your own DB server.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
If you need any help let me know. I manage multiple EC2 instances for my current project.
I setup Chef standalone to provision instances.
I setup Chef standalone to provision instances.
Chef looks fun. Do you see any reason I couldn't use the standalone Chef with the free amazon instances to learn/play? Is it worth using the hosted version of Chef to play around with this? I'll read up on all the components and if I have questions I'll let you know. This will take some trial and error to get familiar with AWS. Thanks for letting me know about Chef. I had started looking into Puppet, but Chef looks subjectively nicer to use.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
The real power of Chef is provisioning large numbers of servers. For what you're looking to do, I don't think you really need the Chef server. Our reason for using Chef is so that we can automate the creation of development servers. For example, if we need to spin up a new instance of a server we can take a base AMI, run Chef on it and be up and running in about 10 minutes. You can also rerun it on a schedule to make sure that nothing has been changed, e.g. httpd.conf.
For playing around, you could definitely use their micro instances, they are pretty slow though.
For playing around, you could definitely use their micro instances, they are pretty slow though.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
Our servers are all large instances. We're only running a couple Tomcat app servers and ApacheDS on them. Our QA server was a m3.medium, but I am impatient so I upped it to a large.
Stereodude
Not really a
That's great! Just keep making posts like that and you'll be a part of the forum in no time.