Something is wrong with 7.1

And I don't have a clue of how to track it down.  When the site is first started it runs fine; the longer it runs, the worst it gets until finally the site refuses to load.  I did not see this with 7.0.9.  I do know it is not a memory problem.  My guess is Dolphin 7.1; which was suppose to be leaner and meaner is overloading the sql server to the point it can not handle requests.

Would the Boonex News forum posts block on the homepage never loading, just spinning spinning spinning be indicative of anything?

yes, allow_url_fopen should be On

It is on, according to php info.  What about allow_url_include?

Another question; why do I see the database cached in the backend cache report when I have turned off DB cache and cleared the cache?

 allow_url_include should be off.

I once noticed something like this in cache system of 7.1, but didn't investigated.

 RE:

 Yes.... it indicates that you forgot to delete that completely useless block in page builder.

register_globals must be Off
safe_mode must be Off
exec() (executable files) must be allowed
short_open_tag must be On
allow_url_fopen should be On
allow_url_include should be Off
open_basedir should not have any value
memory_limit should be 128M or higher

about the db cache no idea i have all the caching options on, it was never a problem for me.

 LOL, for the moment it is off the home page.

I said the longer it runs; however, I think I lied there.  It appears to be related to the number of users online.  The site operates well with approximately 20 users on line but as the number grows the site starts to crawl and with around 50 users the site is unusable.

 All checked out OK, except for the exec() which I did not see in php info but I am assuming it is allowed.  I am getting ready to shell in and increase the cache size limit for mySQL and see what results that has on site performance.

To be perfectly honest, 50 uses online at once? You need a bigger server to handle that.

That number will load down any low end server.

What you have to keep in mind is most linux servers need at least 2 gigs of memory just to run the OS without breaking a sweat. I mean look what the current Windows OS requires for resourses. It's crazy.

Quad core with 4 to 8 gig to start. The OS and MySQL need plenty of breathing room.

Some shared servers can do this, some can't. It really depends on what the hosting company set your account up on. If they put you on a shared that is a big server that they did not oversell you will find it runs better then most VPS servers.

And to be honest. I think the OS itself makes a big difference as well. I used to run a small ISP and i found that Ubuntu, Fedora, ect were less stable and crashed more often then enterprise class OS's such as RedHat and CentOS.

It's all boils down to the server, it's power and how it is configured.

 For that check phpinfo to make sure no functions are disabled. If exec is diabled it would be in the disabled_functions setting

I increased the mySQL query cache size to the recommendation by Boonex.  No effect on the site; at the moment it is useless, can not navigate anywhere.

OK, currently the site is sitting on an Arvixe VPS with 1 gig of ram, and 2 cpu cores.  I do have on order a dedicated server with a CPU with six cores (not a server cpu because we couldn't afford the upgrade at this time) and 16 gig of DDR3 ram with a 100Mbs connection (again, could not afford the upgrade to a faster connection).  The OS is centOS 6 64bit.  The webserver will be Apache and the database mySQL.  We will have full root access to the server.  The price was not too bad and they are going to install all the packages.

While I am waiting for the dedicated server to become ready, I was wanting to make sure that the problem with the slow site was not something misconfigured or something just overloading the mySQL to the point it could not handle the requests; too many connections to the server that was not NORMAL connections.  By the way, what should the max connections be set to?  We already have 800 members waiting to use the site; they will be connecting from around the world although most will probably be from North America and Europe.

Your new dedicated sounds perfect assuming the proper packages are installed. I can provide a list of exact packages for CentOS that would be needed to run dolphin.

I am guessing your current problem is just the lack of ram. 1gig is barely enough to run the OS without choking. MySQL is also a memory hog. I really just believe its lack of memory.

List of needed CentOS packages from the default yum repository.

php
php-cli
php-gd
php-mbstring
php-mysql
php-xml
php-xmlrpc
mysql-server
httpd
ImageMagick
sendmail
sendmail-cf
dovecot

From there it's whatever else you want such as webmin and perhaps phpMyAdmin

If your going to run your own RMS then also install this
yum -y install java*compat java*openjdk

Thanks for the info.  The server is going to have plesk, which I have never used.  It has been way too long since I used Unix and I am having to relearn command line commands; luckily I have my old unix book and the internet.  ImageMagick is one that won't be on the server; I had to install that on the first VPS so I know how to wget the packages and compile and install them.  Once the server is ready, how do I check to see if a particular package is installed?

With modern linux systems there is no need to wget source and compile anything.

All you need can be installed with yum from precompiled packages. and if the default CentOS repository does not have it, then there are others that do. As far as i am conserned, compiling is a thing of the past for any commonly used packages.

Like this from the command line.

yum install ImageMagick

That will install ImageMagick and if it's already installed it will tell you that it already is. Quick, simple and painless. All of the packages i mentioned can be installed with one command to yum.

yum -y install php php-cli php-gd php-mbstring php-mysql php-xml php-xmlrpc mysql-server httpd ImageMagick sendmail sendmail-cf dovecot

Then you can get the proper ones to run at server boot and start the ones that were just installed like so.

chkconfig --level 2345 sendmail on
chkconfig --level 2345 mysqld on
chkconfig --level 2345 httpd on
service sendmail restart > /dev/null
service mysqld restart > /dev/null
service httpd restart > /dev/null


I used to have a script available for dolphin users to setup a fresh CentOS system with all required packages just by running one script. But i have not updated that since centos 5.2, so it's a bit out of date and no longer works.

That just goes to show you how outdated I am; I have been living in the GUI world too long :-).  Thanks for that information.