Site performance, Server errors, outages and tunings

[Lancer]

Hey ra the site is bugging out a bit. I cannot post anything or view images even if I can see the small thumbnail.

[Like Ra]

I cannot post anything or view images even if I can see the small thumbnail.

Thanks for letting me know! WordPress automatically upgraded itself, what reset memcached, what broke MyBB cache. I reset the cache and everything should be back to normal.

[Like Ra]

This thread has reached 400k views!

[Like Ra]

I'm troubleshooting Apache/PHP again. Noticed something strange... You might notice some outages.

[Like Ra]

Pffff..... After 6 hours (it's 4AM here) I'm giving up .... Whatever I tried, the site stops responding after 10-30 minutes with nothing in the logs. Neither MyBB not WordPress is compatible with PHP8.1. Apache 2.4.46 does not work with UNIX file system socket-based Proxy (for PHP-FPM). Apache 2.4.53 MPM Prefork mode is not compatible with HTTP/2.

... what a nightmare ....

So, we are back to Apache 2.4.46 and PHP7.4, but without ModPagespeed and with MPM Event instead of MPM Prefork.
If Google performance tools are fine with no PageSpeed (some pages load even faster without ModPageSpeed), I will leave it like this.

Next maintenance attempt will be MyBB upgrade.

[Like Ra]

Apparently, the future does not belong to Apache - it's slowly dying. I tried to migrate to Nginx some years ago, but it turned out that Nginx did not support virtual servers. Looks like it can be done now (it's called "server blocks"). Also, nginx begins to support HTTP/3 and QUIC in a separate branch. Apache -> Nginx migration is painful.

Another possibility is OpenLiteSpeed. It's less stable, than non-free LiteSpeed, and can not read all Apache files (like LiteSpeed), yet the rewriting rules are compatible and I do not use .htaccess (not supported in OpeLiteSpeed). HTTP3-QUIC are natively supported. And LiteSpeed is the fastest. Worth a try?

[Like Ra]

I think I found it!

PHP-FPM processes were not released by Apache workers, and since there are much more Apache workers, than PHP processes, PHP stopped responding until freed (somehow). Most likely the reason was option "enablereuse=on", which I currently removed from the ProxyPassMatch statement, and it looks MUCH better now! We are currently on the latest Apache version and we are going strong!

[Like Ra]

without ModPagespeed

If Google performance tools are fine with no PageSpeed (some pages load even faster without ModPageSpeed), I will leave it like this.

PageSpeed reduces the page sizes and amount of requests (what is good, especially for mobile users) at the expense of the initial delay and some Google performance points. So I returned PageSpeed - not many will notice 0.1-0.3 sec initial delay.

Next thing to try is to replace network socket FCGI connections with UNIX socket ones. That should reduce the connection table, simplify and speed up a bit the communication between Apache and PHP.

Since everything is working, I will put OpenLiteSpeed testing "on-hold" for the time being, and will try to upgrade the forum software (we are several point versions behind) and tweak the plugins as requested. Wish us all luck! 😊😇

[Like Ra]

We are running on the UNIX sockets now (Apache -> PHP), and all HTTP requests are automatically redirected to HTTPS. No more confusion, no duplicate content, no unsecure places - exactly how it should be.

[boundsolo]

Just a note, as of the last update the side ads no longer work on Firefox V 100.0