[Forum] More help and advice, please.

[Bo Peep]

My forum is hosted by Global Gold UK. I have been having a lot of problems with the site being really slow and/or crashing. At first, I was told I needed a more expensive package, but having checked the user stats, I was advised I was well within my allowance.

My site was offline for eight hours yesterday, and I have now been told this by the techie chap at Global Gold:-

I think there's a problem with your web site. Our guide figure of 600 simultaneous is applied to forums without any plugins or additional scripts. In your case we believe there's some code that's causing your server to crash. I would recommend trying to isolate the cause of this.

Apart from having someone add Google Analytics to the site, nothing else has been done to the site for over a year. The problem with the site crashing/going slow started about three months ago and is getting worse. Any ideas, please?

[Lynne]

You have a *ton* of forums (how many do you have?). It is recommended to not have over 1000 forums. You may want to consider using Prefixes instead for some of those categories.

[Bo Peep]

Not sure what you are talking about but I apologise for bothering you.

[Riasat]

you have about 600 forums/subforums. Having that many will hurt your site performance. You need to rethink your forum structure (try to use prefix) and reduce it

[Lynne]

Not sure what you are talking about but I apologise for bothering you.

Huh? All I did was suggest you may not want to have that many forums. Using prefixes, instead of forums, will really help out.

[Bo Peep]

According to Global Gold, V 4.0.7 which I was running, was unstable and this was causing the site to crash. Global Gold said that if I upgraded, it would stop the problems. Global Gold has upgraded the site and so far, so good.

I am sorry, but I have no idea what you mean about using prefixes instead of forums.

[Lynne]

Here's a section in the manual about Thread Prefixes

For instance, in History Topics, you could use prefixes instead of forums for Medevil, Tudor, Normans, etc. That would eliminate those forums and you'd have all the threads in the main category using prefixes instead.

[Bo Peep]

Wow! I had no idea that could be done. It would certainly make the forum tidier. Thank you very much.

[Lynne]

Wow! I had no idea that could be done. It would certainly make the forum tidier. Thank you very much.

I also have a modification over on vb.org to allow users to click on the prefix and it will only show threads with that prefix - Make Prefixes Clickable to Filter Forumdisplay

[Mark.B]

Yep that's gonna sting!

Cut that right back, I mean like really. Hundreds and hundreds of forums like that is what's causing your issues.

GlobalGold are competent hosts and their servers are well configured by vBulletin so it's certainly not a hosting issue.

[Bo Peep]

It sounds brilliant, but it may take me some time to figure out what to do - like I have said, I am a novice with software. Also, after the upgrade, all the member profiles are messed up and the chap who did the design for me wants a lot of money to correct them. I may be gone some time trying to figure it all out.

Thank you very much for your help, it is much appreciated.