Changelog

[Q]

Updated MyBB-Plugins

So I updated the plugins pertaining to Profile Pictures, custom profile fields, user Mentions (with @) and the Mood. Setting your Mood should now work again.

[Q]

Updated Introductions Area

Abdicated the four old Stickies in the Introductions Area, to replace them with a new, consolidated text, given by our Owner Swammy.

[Q]

Increased file upload size limit

So I increased our file upload limits to 16 MB for images. Also added the file type ".webp", which as of now is also permitted to upload.

A note on failed Image Uploads: Please make sure your content's file type and your image file extension are the same. So if you upload a file that ends in ".png" it mus be encoded as a PNG file, or otherwise our Forum software will reject it, citing some general upload error. If you are unsure about this, and have too much time, see this post of mine, where I explain how to spot this issue.

[Q]

Updated the Forum Descriptions to use SVG icons (Bootstrap's "exclamation-circle-fill" and "info-circle").

[Q]

FullText Search sped up, with DB speeding up

     

So, I was googling around and found MyISAM as MySQL storage engine to be a speed killer. And what do you know? Our Forum software was using MyISAM for most tables.
So I converted some of the database tables from MyISAM to the newer InnoDB. The performance gains were small at first. But InnoDB allowed me in turn to set a big "innodb_buffer_pool_size" of about a Gigabyte of RAM with our MariaDB Server. Now after doing a first Search, successive searches are much much much faster, as the underlying database table gets cached by our database server now.

So....Despite our over 1 Million Posts, the Search now will return within 3 to 4 seconds in most cases.


Unfortunately, the Database Server eats too much RAM. Had to reduce it to a few hundred MB, so the machine doesn't grind to a halt again. The Search has become faster anyhow.

Additionally, thanks to using InnoDB now, the main page shouldn't get hung up any more, if someone else is doing a Search. How so? - Well the former Database engine MyISAM, was doing transactional locking on the whole table, freezing the Forum while a search was running. The InnoDB engine, in contrast has 'row locking'; so multiple read-accesses can be running on the same table at the same time. Thus fixing the hang-ups we have had.