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GForum running a job once a day?

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GForum running a job once a day?
Hi

We have gforum running as part of a site on a server which we control.

Every day at around 1pm the server gets appears to get overloaded and starts to respond very slowly.
The program that appears to be taking up the cpu time is gforum.cgi.
It's version 1.2.0 of gforum.

Is this a known problem? Does gforum run a daily task? Can anyone suggest what the problem might be?

thanks
Tim
Tim Ault
Oxford UK
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Re: [timbo] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
We still have the problem described below.
It now occurs just after 2pm (we're on summer time now).

As an experiment today, we disabled the forum at 1.55.
The server was fine just after 2, for the first time for a while.

At around 2.30 we enabled the forum again.
Within seconds we had the usual problem - cpu overload of 6x (we have 2 cpus, so that's serious).

So it seems that issue is with gforum.
And it seems that gforum is running a routine once a day which causes the cpu overload.
It seems that the routine is triggered by the first visitor to the forum after 2pm.
Or something similar.

Please could someone from gossamer comment?

Will upgrading the forum solve the problem?

best wishes
Tim
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Re: [timbo] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
There's subscribe.pl script that runs daily (if you set up the cron job). But other than that, there's nothing that runs at a regular interval.

Adrian
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Re: [timbo] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
Other things that could be causing problems:
- Plugins, do you have any installed?
- Are you sure someone isn't attempting to overload your server remotely by making many remote connections to gforum.cgi?

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
OK we found the problem, eventually ....

Buried away in one of the modules which gforum.cgi calls, there is a piece of code which runs every 24 hours.
It's meant to clean up the gforum_guest table by removing old entries.
The cleanup routine isn't working properly, and our _guest table had got huge, over a million rows.

Each time gforum.cgi is run, the routine checks to see if there are entries in the table over 24 hours old.
If there are, it runs the delete query.
So in effect it runs once a day (+ a few seconds)
We think it's this query which was hogging the memory / cpu.

Not sure exactly why this process was failing to tidy up the _guest table, but clearing down the table has solved the problem on our server, for now at least.

I hope this helps others ....

Tim

Last edited by:

timbo: Apr 10, 2009, 11:20 AM
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Re: [timbo] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
Make sure your indexes on the Guest table are there. In particular there should be an index on the guest_last_time column.

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] GForum running a job once a day? In reply to
Adrian

Thanks for the reply - yes that index exists.
Tim