Too much traffic?

Howdy, folks. Recently people are telling me that it takes about a minute to post to the forums. That's about what I see on my side, too. Currently on my site there are 10 members logged in and 16 guests. My site is on Namecheap on a "business class" shared server.

I'm curious about the performance of other Composr sites that have 10 or more active members logged in at the same time, and something like 16 guests browsing the site. Also, my site uses the built-in chat system, and there are 7 people in there right now, maybe more, but in the future, it could be 50. I propose the following questions, keeping in mind the server is a typical shared server. Any insights are welcome.

• At what point in the number of logged in members and guests should a Composr site consider a VPS or dedicated server?
• What number of logged in members and guests on a Composr site is practical where the site speed is fast?
• What number of logged in members and guests on a Composr site before the site can become throttled by the provider (Namecheap in this case)
• If a site is throttled and slowed down because of the number of members logged in and guests browsing, is this a throttling of CPU or of bandwidth?
• What percentage of CPU time does built-in Composr chat take up? In other words, is the site being taxed because of chat, or because of the number of members active and logged in, or simply because it's a low-end shared server?
• What sort of server would be required if (eventually) video chat was added to the built-in Composr chat?

As a general survey, what sort of server do you use for your Composr site, and why?

Thanks!
 

I'm taking a look at this.

Automated fix message

Malatesa said

Howdy, folks. Recently people are telling me that it takes about a minute to post to the forums. That's about what I see on my side, too. Currently on my site there are 10 members logged in and 16 guests. My site is on Namecheap on a "business class" shared server.

I'm curious about the performance of other Composr sites that have 10 or more active members logged in at the same time, and something like 16 guests browsing the site. Also, my site uses the built-in chat system, and there are 7 people in there right now, maybe more, but in the future, it could be 50. I propose the following questions, keeping in mind the server is a typical shared server. Any insights are welcome.

• At what point in the number of logged in members and guests should a Composr site consider a VPS or dedicated server?
• What number of logged in members and guests on a Composr site is practical where the site speed is fast?
• What number of logged in members and guests on a Composr site before the site can become throttled by the provider (Namecheap in this case)
• If a site is throttled and slowed down because of the number of members logged in and guests browsing, is this a throttling of CPU or of bandwidth?
• What percentage of CPU time does built-in Composr chat take up? In other words, is the site being taxed because of chat, or because of the number of members active and logged in, or simply because it's a low-end shared server?
• What sort of server would be required if (eventually) video chat was added to the built-in Composr chat?

As a general survey, what sort of server do you use for your Composr site, and why?

Thanks!
 

This issue has now been filed on the tracker as issue #4576, with a fix.

So this was totally a bug, a nasty one. The more post replies, the slower it got to post further ones. The hotfix above is solid.
It's not really related to server capacity much.

Quickly going through your questions…

I can't give specific figures for any host, or talk about any individual host's policies. But very roughly a page hit should use less than 0.1 seconds of CPU time (very much depending on configuration and CPU).

Bandwidth is very rarely a factor, CPU is normally the main one.

Chat is pretty efficient. It has to continuously poll for new messages (every few seconds), but it can do this without fully bootstrapping Composr each time or even opening a DB connection.

Video chat, I couldn't really speak to that much OTTOMH. Depends on if the video server is having to do transcoding or not, but mainly I think it would be more of a bandwidth issue.