[redmt]

Originally Posted by headboff

Some of our user sessions may take up more server memory than others. Something to try would be visiting the site in incognito or private browsing modes and logging in after you've navigated to where you want to be. My other thought is that this could be caused by a memory leak somewhere, depending on how PHP is being ran, that could be occurring in or around the PHP interpreter or within one or more of those background processes.

That would help to explain the periodical nature of this issue, and also how some users seem to be impacted by this issue while others are not. And again, without being in the position to know or verify our hypotheses, this is all just conjecture.

I don't think the number of accounts on the site has much of an impact on normal performance. As of the time of this posting, there are 17,002 members out of 86,660 on this site who have posted a minimum of one post (that's only 19.6% of the forum population who have ever posted anything). Doing a little napkin math, that should be ~350MB if each nearly empty profile uses ~5KB. Assuming the database is properly indexed and queries take advantage of those indexes, traversals should only take 11% longer than they otherwise would. Unless vBulletin is doing full table scans somewhere, this shouldn't be much of an issue for the software.

I can certainly acknowledge the annoyance for humans though. Deleting accounts that have never posted anything and haven't logged in the past five years should be pretty simple in SQL, and that's only if vBulletin's built-in user pruning isn't up to the task.

Yup! That's exzactly what I was thinkin'. I'm glad that you were able to put it into words.