How much would a Website developer charge to fix my forum performance issues?

lsheed_cn said:
My suggestion, is if you're using SMF, make sure you have some sort of bot blocking.

You'll probably find a high proportion of traffic is botnet stuff trying to register and post viagra and other spam ads, as well as hack attempts.

I use the http:BL over on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/, together with the Bad Behaviour plugin, on one forum I run as one mitigating solution, although the users are ungrateful buggers, sigh.

Brings load down quite a bit when you're not serving 3000% of page loads to spammers.

I'm pretty sure thats going to be the issue though, as I see lots of that. Depending on your users, you can also block swathes of countries - .UA is a prime one for blocking if you don't have users from there, as that seems to be where lots my hacker attempts come from (and I don't have valid users there).


If you saw load decreased after moving to cloudflare, I'd say this is extremely likely to be the actual issue, as they have a fair bit of bad bot blocking going on.

Whats your forum url?
Click to expand...
consoleracing.co.za
I've cancelled cloudfare for the migration and havent activated it again
 
Took a quick quick look.

I'd hide the version numbers in the footer, doesn't help to have people know immediately what they're looking at.
Eg if there is a vulnerability for 2.07 SMF, bots and hackers google that and find sites to hack.

You have the forum in a non standard URL - /Forum, thats good, as its not a typical url so similar thing to above (people googling for stuff).

I'd check logs and try correlate usage with times that the provider has said its been offline / slow.
You'll probably find its either a crawler or botnet using up gigs of pointless bandwidth.

Mind you, you have moved, and hopefully its all good now.

Looking at logs doesn't hurt though!
 
Thank you for your time and suggestions.
I really appreciate it and will try and see if I can implement your suggestions.

I thought I had to display version number?
 
Its in the template, can be removed.

Its in the index.template.php (for your template) in the footer part. May be different for your forum, as you use a cms style mod, but its in one of those files for sure.

I think as long as you put SMF its ok, but I'd definitely hide version numbers. Doesn't stop evil doers, but does reduce attacks, as they'll pick an easier target.
 
lsheed_cn said:
Its in the template, can be removed.

Its in the index.template.php (for your template) in the footer part. May be different for your forum, as you use a cms style mod, but its in one of those files for sure.

I think as long as you put SMF its ok, but I'd definitely hide version numbers. Doesn't stop evil doers, but does reduce attacks, as they'll pick an easier target.
Click to expand...

Sorry I meant like in SMF rules or TOC.
I thought I had to display it.
Should be able to find it, even if I have to Google.
:)

Thx.
 
Try creating a phpinfo file and check to see the PHP memory limit. We noticed 2 years ago that many sites become slow as they reach the limitation of PHP. We upped our servers and increased PHP memory limit to 128MB. Take Magento for example it wants 256MB minumum to work smoothy.

I recommend asking your host if they could up that for you and then retry aswell. May help a bit :)
 
Just a quick note, if you use cloudflare, googlebot ignores crawl rates. Learned that the hard way over the weekend.
 
Hostking said:
Try creating a phpinfo file and check to see the PHP memory limit. We noticed 2 years ago that many sites become slow as they reach the limitation of PHP. We upped our servers and increased PHP memory limit to 128MB. Take Magento for example it wants 256MB minumum to work smoothy.

I recommend asking your host if they could up that for you and then retry aswell. May help a bit :)
Click to expand...
I will ask the hosting company.
I don't have any php experience, so would not know how to create the info file.
The upped the server part, I presume would be just going for a more expensive package?

envo said:
Just a quick note, if you use cloudflare, googlebot ignores crawl rates. Learned that the hard way over the weekend.
Click to expand...
I haven't activated the cloadflare servers again since I migrated.
Looking at your post, I assume you don't recommend it?
I have any knowledge about crawl rates, but will google it.

I'm hoping to have some time on the weekend to look at the site and implement some of the advice..

Thx for the replies and advice.
;)
 
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lsheed_cn said:
My suggestion, is if you're using SMF, make sure you have some sort of bot blocking.

You'll probably find a high proportion of traffic is botnet stuff trying to register and post viagra and other spam ads, as well as hack attempts.

I use the http:BL over on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/, together with the Bad Behaviour plugin, on one forum I run as one mitigating solution, although the users are ungrateful buggers, sigh.
Click to expand...
Is this applicable for shared servers?

Edit:
I have downloaded the script.
I haven't uploaded yet.
If something goes wrong, will uploading the script to a live live site, render it useless or is it something I can try uploading to a live site?
 
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RoMark said:
I haven't activated the cloadflare servers again since I migrated.
Looking at your post, I assume you don't recommend it?
I have knowledge about crawl rates, but will google it.

I'm hoping to have some time on the weekend to look at the site and implement some of the advice..

Thx for the replies and advice.
;)
Click to expand...

If you moved to a more powerful server I doubt it would affect you much, unless the bottleneck is the code. With me, my bottleneck was code, but it ran fine for the userbase I had. The problem came in when google decided to crawl my site at 80k hits per hour. Which effectively killed the server.

It's behind cloudflare, and everyone said I should go on webmaster tools and change the crawl rate to something slow, but I couldn't, it was always set as "automatic" without the option to change. So I added a crawl rate flag in the robots.txt which also didn't help. Eventually my host told me that even though I did those things, I can't change it and googlebot ignores it since I'm behind cloudflare.
 
envo said:
If you moved to a more powerful server I doubt it would affect you much, unless the bottleneck is the code. With me, my bottleneck was code, but it ran fine for the userbase I had. The problem came in when google decided to crawl my site at 80k hits per hour. Which effectively killed the server.

It's behind cloudflare, and everyone said I should go on webmaster tools and change the crawl rate to something slow, but I couldn't, it was always set as "automatic" without the option to change. So I added a crawl rate flag in the robots.txt which also didn't help. Eventually my host told me that even though I did those things, I can't change it and googlebot ignores it since I'm behind cloudflare.
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Wow, that is a lot of hits!

How can I identify if the code, database or something else is the problem or can only someone with experience pick it up?

Current page load is about 7 seconds. It use to be about 63 seconds.
My yslow ranking has gone down again since I stopped Cloadflare.
 
Forget about yslow, its not really good for anything other than general advice.

The httpbl stuff is a plugin for SMF to stop registrations/ visits by spammers.
Most load these days in forum sites is by spammers crawling forums.

You should have server logs. Look at them.
Will typically be called access.log or similar, if not, ask your provider where the logs are for your site, and/or ask for access to them.
Some providers will install some log software to read the logs eg awstats or similar.

For looking at your php info (as someone mentioned php memory use), upload a file called

phpinfo.php

That contains

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Use a plain text editor to create it, and upload to your website somewhere where you can visit it in a browser (eg public_html or similar depending on provider). Then visit that page to see the info in a browser.


Your cms choice is basically a plugin system for SMF - its similar to phpnuke used to be.

Other than visit load (eg lots and lots of visitors at once, usually bots and botnets!), its mostly going to be database query heavy for page loads.
 
lsheed_cn said:
I use the http:BL over on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/, together with the Bad Behaviour plugin, on one forum I run as one mitigating solution, although the users are ungrateful buggers, sigh.
Click to expand...
I've completed most of the steps, but not to sure how to proceed with last step (Step 4).
I've pm'd you regarding this.

Hostking said:
Try creating a phpinfo file and check to see the PHP memory limit. We noticed 2 years ago that many sites become slow as they reach the limitation of PHP. We upped our servers and increased PHP memory limit to 128MB. Take Magento for example it wants 256MB minumum to work smoothy.
Click to expand...

lsheed_cn said:
For looking at your php info (as someone mentioned php memory use), upload a file called

phpinfo.php

That contains

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Use a plain text editor to create it, and upload to your website somewhere where you can visit it in a browser (eg public_html or similar depending on provider). Then visit that page to see the info in a browser.

Other than visit load (eg lots and lots of visitors at once, usually bots and botnets!), its mostly going to be database query heavy for page loads.
Click to expand...
I have uploaded the phpinfo file and it seems I have 128MB memory.
Not sure if there are any other info that I must look at?

I could aslo not find a place to remove the SMF version.
I did look at index.template file

I found this, but this will remove everything, I think?

PHP: 
<div id="footer_section"><div class="frame">
		<ul class="reset">
			<li class="copyright">', theme_copyright(), '</li>
 
RoMark said:
I've completed most of the steps, but not to sure how to proceed with last step (Step 4).
I've pm'd you regarding this.




I have uploaded the phpinfo file and it seems I have 128MB memory.
Not sure if there are any other info that I must look at?

I could aslo not find a place to remove the SMF version.
I did look at index.template file

I found this, but this will remove everything, I think?

PHP: 
<div id="footer_section"><div class="frame">
		<ul class="reset">
			<li class="copyright">', theme_copyright(), '</li>
Click to expand...
I've just picked up on this ticket now.

Your PHP memory_limit is per script, we default this to 128M. Your user is allowed to use 512M of memory in total. I have set the memory_limit to 512M, phpinfo will reflect that.

You can edit the limit in cPanel -> Software/Services -> Select PHP Version -> Switch to PHP Settings.
 
JasonH said:
I've just picked up on this ticket now.

Your PHP memory_limit is per script, we default this to 128M. Your user is allowed to use 512M of memory in total. I have set the memory_limit to 512M, phpinfo will reflect that.

You can edit the limit in cPanel -> Software/Services -> Select PHP Version -> Switch to PHP Settings.
Click to expand...

You have lost me a bit?
Which ticket?
Is the info indeed aimed me?
 
RoMark said:
You have lost me a bit?
Which ticket?
Is the info indeed aimed me?
Click to expand...

RoMark, yes the information was aimed at you. I just wanted to explain the memory limit settings in our hosting environment further as there was mention in this thread regarding the memory limits.

Let me know if you have any questions.
 
JasonH said:
RoMark, yes the information was aimed at you. I just wanted to explain the memory limit settings in our hosting environment further as there was mention in this thread regarding the memory limits.

Let me know if you have any questions.
Click to expand...

Ah okay.
So you are from my favourite Hosting company, Elite?
I will check tomorrow.
Thx Jason.
:)
 
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