Have you added – or changed the settings of an existing – caching plugin at all?

Ah yes, I have just added WP Super Cache on the advice of my hosting service.  What do I need to do?

That’s fine but you MUST exclude the forum page from the cache as the cache relies upon static data and the forum page, of course, is dynamic.

somewhere in the options you can excluyde pages – put the base forum slug in there and it should all then be well – although you may need to empty the cache.. not sure about that.

My hosting provider have given me this response:

“The forum is what is causing all the SQL traffic. If you exclude it from the cache, there is no point to using cache at all. Your page is essentially just a forum. I think simplepress was poorly written and not optimized at all, which causes it to be very heavy on SQL usage. You may want to ask them what you can do to reduce the amount of queries it uses.”

Basically, my site database usage needs to be reined in as it is handling 8x more queries than any other database they host (including their own). It has made 58 *million* queries in the last 3 days alone. It is doing about 200 queries / second (more than all the databases on the other servers in their pools combined).

In effect, I am being advised not to use the Simple:Press forum on my site.  This is not a route I want to go down as I have invested a lot of time and money into making this work, but it simply is not working properly for me at the moment.  Is there anything you can advise?

It’s a forum. All forums are data intensive. OK – forum plugins like bbPress may well be less data heavy but it also lacks the level of capability that comes with SP. WordPress sites are basically static by nature with very low levels of data change. Forums – especially busy ones – are dynamic with an ever changing face to the data. This is why WP-style caching can not work because the cached page is inaccurate the moment another post is made.

To perform that many queries your forum must be pumping out about 225 SQL calls every second non-stop for three days. That suggests that you have a really, really extremely permanently busy forum. And if that is truly the case then I would expect that level of activity to be on a dedicated web server. Anything less than that and you would expect bottlenecks and hosting complaints.

I don’t know what sort of hosting you are on but if you are on anything shared with that level of activity then… it is going to slow down and annoy the other websites sharing the resources.

As to what causes the high level of SQL activity… basically options, complex permissions, unnecessary plugins. It all adds up one small piece at a time. There are so many permutations it is difficult to say but as with any such software, the cleaner and leaner you run it the better the performance and resources needed.

We have users with up to 750,000 members and vast numbers of topics and posts being regularly made. Like all websites – these users need to pick their hosting with care and, as I say, when they hot a certain level of activity need dedicated hosting.

Response from hosting provider:

I’ve looked at your forum and it is definitely NOT that busy. There is absolutely no reason for it to be making that many queries. Even with the caching, you’re still using more SQL than our next two busiest customers combined. We also host some /very/ large, very busy forums and they’re using 1/5th the SQL yours is. Something is not set up properly with your forum, and something with that amount of traffic definitely doesn’t require a dedicated server. If the SP developer / help desk person you talked to took a second to look at your forum, they’d realize that there is no way the amount of SQL usage is normal.

Can you please find a way to help me sort this out as there definitely seems to be a problem with this forum and if it is not sorted soon I will be forced to uninstall it.

not sure what we can do… we have users where their forums have a million users with hundreds or thousands on at the same time… simple press is not a load there…  or here… or elsewhere except for a handful of users (mostly on shared hosting)…  and frankly, those who have had issues were cpu issues not mysql…

sp is an extra load on wp of course, like any other plugin – its additive…

how many forums do you have?  how many users?

one thing you can check, on forum – options – global settings, try disabling the error logging…  if you have a server configuration generating strange errors, notices, warnings, perhaps the error logging is bogging you down…

We have 1 admin, 5 moderators, 25 contributors and 7 subscribers, so I am sure you can see this is not a huge forum.  There are only 9 forums; one of these is not available to subscribers and another is only available to moderators and admins.

I have tried disabling error logging but not sure what effect it will have.  Something is obviously very wrong here to be causing the issue it is with such a small forum.

1. Go to the forum admin > Toolbox > Environment and copy the results displayed in the panel and send them to me AND to Mr Papa in a PM.
2. In the same PM send us a link to your forum page so we can look at it.
3. Somewhere on your web server is a php error log (typically it will be in the root folder of the website and will just be called ‘error.log’ although this is not always the case). Looking at it now – how big is it (file size) and of you download it and look at the contents in a text editor do you see many entries for the same error repeated and any mention of mySQL being mentioned regularly? Again – you can add these answers to the PM.

Please also include in the PM a link to this thread so we can find it and refer to it quickly.

besides what Andy said, please let us know if any change from disabling the error log…  2 other users had some mysql wonkiness with it on…

I have sent that message now so please check your inbox.  I cannot find the error.log anywhere.

The problem is that the error log could potentially be vital. It may not reveal anything but it realy is the first thing to look at and needs discounting. Normally – by default – the main php error log is located on the root foldewrt on the server – i.e., the same folder where your wp-config.php file is located.

We really do need that information even if only to discount things.

As you can see from the attached screenshot there is NO error.log in my root folder.  Could that be what is causing the problem?  Would it help if I PM you the ftp settings of the site?

Depends where it is. Might not be able to get t it using ftp. You might need to use your hosting control panel.

Can I suggest you just simply ask your host support where it is and how you can get to look at it?