Some of you may have seen this error pop up when replying to topics:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 1 second exceeded in /home/admin/domains/warez-bb.org/public_html/includes/topic_review.php on line 213

As you can see, we have a maximum execution time of 1 second. This means that the execution of the PHP script will end after 1 second. This is a fair value because if any page cannot generate within 1 second, it usually will slow the server/site down. Our mistake was that this maximum execution time was initially set at 10 seconds and as you could imagine, it caused quite a lot of load on our servers. So yesterday, we decreased the maximum execution time to 1 second.

However, another problem occurred, there was a substantial increase in the number of errors above. It even prompted a topic in the Forum Comments section. Clearly something had to be done to fix it.

Through more investigation, we found out that the reason why this was occurring was because of censors. Censors use up the most amount of resources on our servers. This is why very aggressive methods are used to increased the efficiency of censors. I think I have discussed how the tweak works in previous blog entries. However, this tweak was never programmed into topic_view.php hence why replying to topics with large posts pegged the CPU at 100% for 10 seconds (or 1 second since yesterday).

To fix it, we simply had to port the tweak we made throughout the rest of the forum to topic_review. And volia, fixed =D.

Lets cross our fingers and hope this error does not happen again. If it does, we’ll have to invest into using memcache just like the rest of the forum.

PS Because censors taxes so much CPU, an even faster censors system is to be developed soon.

We managed to catch this error in the act and have patched up our script to prevent the two most common conditions that has been causing this error.

There has been reports on members from India not being able to access our site. We’re aware of this issue and based on our research this appears to be a problem with the network rather than something that we can fix ourselves. We have already reported this issue to our DC who will forward it to their bandwidth provider and go through the red tape from there.

We’re pleased to announce that from here on now, the 500 errors that plagued our community has been irradiated.

The 500 errors at the moment are due to our efforts to optimize the server.

I’ll save the technical stuff for later, all you need to know is that this upgrade increases performance and it’s going to have a downtime of roughly 2 hours.

A small configuration error prevented the avatars from being synced. This has now been fixed.

Since last night I am glad to say that indexing the search doesn’t appear to be causing any 500 errors anymore. The culprit was due to the fact that we would ask for 250 posts each query and this caused some locking issues with MySQL.

A “locking issue” is caused when we’re trying to read a part of the database which is being written to, as a result that read query is blocked or stopped and caused to wait before the writes are submitted.

By reducing the number of posts to read at each query to 10, we’ve decreased locking contention and improved smoothness in indexing the search.

The bad news?

Well, the 500 errors are still occurring and we need to see what queries is now causing it. The worse case that we could see is that our resources on both servers are maxed out already and we need more capacity for PHP and MySQL to grow.

Sorry about that, we were testing out an automation script to flush topic views to MySQL before we restart Memcached. We were also testing out an automation script to keep Memcached running even if it suddenly stops running.

There has been complaints about Warez-BB redirecting to an Islamic site. The reason why is because you have been going to our domain name using .com when our actual domain name is Warez-BB.org.

Please make sure that you go to the correct domain name. The .com domain name is not owned by us. That owner redirects some traffic to us and some to preach about Mohamad and Islam. Here at WBB, we believe that the person doing this is actually giving Islam a bad name. And whoever is doing this should stop this domain hijacking behavior or else punitive action will take place.