Is a dedicated database server likely to speed up an SMF based site?

[PrimalPrime]

Thank you.

[vbgamer45]

What are you running now?

[PrimalPrime]

It's a pretty fast server but there is a lot of activity including file uploads and downloads.

[Illori]

that really does not help anyone to answer your question. we need the server specs and the specs of your forum. also is anything else being run on the server?

[PrimalPrime]

Well, it's a 32 core (64 threads?), 128GB RAM RAID 10 server and its basically idling but my site speed is disappointing. So I am wondering if the database might be the bottleneck. Before upgrading to the new host (but not this high end a server), we were getting SMF cannot connect to database errors and other issues seemingly related to the database, perhaps the number of connections. Not sure.

[Kindred]

Who is yours host?

[PrimalPrime]

LiquidWeb. They did give me this command below to enter to see if the database is at issue, with the accompanying directions but its way over my head.

You can copy and paste this into a terminal or SSH session. Apologies for it being a rather large block, but it'll give you a general overview of the entire SQL server. You can also enable the slow query log in /etc/my.cnf if needing to track anything specific.

Code Select Expand

echo ; grep -E 'max_connections|key_buffer|innodb_buffer_pool_(size|instances)|table_open_cache|max_allowed_packet|query_cache|buffer_size|table_open_cache' /etc/my.cnf | grep -Ev '^#'; echo ; mysql -e "show global status like 'Max_used_connections'; show variables like '%max_connection%';" ; mysql -e "\s" | grep Uptime ; echo ; mysql -e "show variables like '%version';" ; echo "Active MySQL data"; mysql -e "show global status;" | grep -E 'Qcache|Key_(blocks_u|read)|Innodb_buffer_pool_((read_r|reads)|pages_(data|total|free)|wait)|innodb_buff' ; mysql -Bse 'show variables like "datadir";'|awk '{print $2}'|xargs -I{} find {} -type f -printf "%s %f\n"|awk -F'[ ,.]' '{print $1, $NF}'|awk '{array[$2]+=$1} END {for (i in array) {printf("%-15s %s\n", sprintf("%.3f MB", array[i]/1048576), i)}}' | egrep '(MYI|ibd)' ; echo ; mysqladmin proc stat

[Kindred]

How many simultaneous users do you have online at once?

[PrimalPrime]

1300 was highest ever so far.

[vbgamer45]

Any caching enable in SMF? do you have something like memcache?

Did you optimize your my.cnf file  https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl
You can also optimize your webserver setup as well.

[PrimalPrime]

I tried Memcache/Memcached. The host did ensure its running for me but I didn't notice any immediate, significant benefit and then I read something here I think that scared me off it. Something about it not being appropriate for gifs/webps/images? That github .cnf file optimization looks sexy. I will check it out with host. They are very helpful.

[vbgamer45]

What is slow on the forum? Posting? Download files? Opening certain pages?

[PrimalPrime]

The pages that have a lot of webps, gifs, jpgs, and pngs are slow, the most popular content basically.