Unfortunately you are correct. This is the second time in two months! After the first time I switched to Gemini tables to benefit from the improved crash revovery. This recovery mechanism is totally useless when the gemini.db file gets corrupted and the database won't even with the FORCE parameter! I'm not impressed. I have now reverted back to MyISAM. I have turned delayed key writes off which is a major cause of corrupt indexes, so hopefully we should be OK for a bit longer.

Oh yeah... I had to revert to a backup from Saturday, so two days of posts and users are gone forever.

One other thing I have done is pruned all usenet posts over 90 days old. This will be the case until I move to a bigger server. This should be happening shortly after tax refund day. :) It will be running on a nice dual machine with striped disks and 1GB of RAM. If that's not enough hardware then I quit!

So once again, I'm sorry for the problems but I'm doing my best with the tools available.

Originally posted by mw1
Curse MYsql.
Hmmm wouldn't it be good if there was forum software that used Oracle, Sybase, SAPdb, Postgresql and Interbase.
Databases where corupted data isn't a common occurrence.
Forum software that uses 1/4 of vbulletins queries.
:D
Actually, MattR, a super mod here, owns fanhome.com. He converted his forum software to use Sybase. They probably need it though, as they get around a bazillion page views a day.

Ive actually been working on one for around a year .
It supports -
- Oracle
- Sybase
- Postgresql- SAPdb
- Firebird/Interbase
Mysql is just too limited to be of any use for a forum that needs to be scaleable. I just can't do without sub selects , triggers and stored procedures.

The forum has all the usual Vbulletin features plus threaded view (done in a single query), subcategories and performamce at miniumum three times better than Vbulletin.

I just need to finish up a few admin funcions and find a few willing beta testers.

Im also in the process in doing some benchmarking of forum software using Httperf. I just have to connect up a second machine to re run the tests from.

Forums being benchmarked are -
- Vbulletin
- Gforum (gossamer threads)
- Ubbthreads(if I can get a legal copy)
- PHPbb2
- Ikonboard
- plus mine (no name yet)

I have already done some testing and I was shocked to see the sql that the forums use. Some developers really need to do some basic study of relational databases, relational being the key word.

For me the database is the core of a forum but to some other developers it seems to be secondary to the script. I think they've got it the wrong way around.

For the php ones Ive enabled memory logging to see what how much memory the scripts use. I don't think some developers seem to realise that certain functions like eval() or regular expression functions use a lot of memory when run multiple times on one page.

I haven't seen any real benchmarking of forum software done yet - just the "mine is better than yours" claims is all I've seen. So this should prove useful.

Sounds very interesting mw1. I'd be interested in seeing more details of your forum software.

Originally posted by Paul
Sounds very interesting mw1. I'd be interested in seeing more details of your forum software.

I'll get a demo up in the next few days. The demo is broken at the moment because I've been rewriting a few procedures so the php code needs a minor change.

The server I have access to is an old freebsd server so I have Postgresql on that. MattR has actually seen a very old version of it which had a web interface in tcl. But its changed hugely from that and it is written in PHP now.

It has a couple of helpful improvements for navigation through a forum too which other forum software doesn't have. I won't post the url here though, it has to stay private for the moment so I'll email it.

Im not a 12 year old who thinks PHP is kewl and have hacked together some php scripts. I've been working on this for a year now so it should provide some serious competition in the enterprise end of forum software.

I'll just post one screenshot for now. Just remember I am red/green colour blind and have absolutely no intention of doing the final templates. I'll leave that to a graphic designer.

The screenshot is of the index page. As you can see there can be sub categories which are shown in a tree like view.
A few other features -
- threaded view for posts, this is optional and users can view in flat mode if the want.
- template support - users can choose between templates and each template can also have multiple css files.
- multiple language support - Users can select their language. The language files are completely seperate from template files.
- forum groups - This enables a group of users to have private access to a forum.
Users can be added by administrators or moderators or users can join themselves by using a password. These options are configurable per group. There can be more than one group per forum.
- The pages will display the same on all browsers - The screenshot is with Mozilla on Linux.


That's all the extra features I'll mention for now. The main aim is to produce a forum that scales well. For example the index page only uses 3 queries. That page generation time of .008 second is correct too. I don't like a page taking more than .02 of a second to generate and lower than .01 is better.

I think I remember that (SQLBoard or something?). I'd like to be kept informed as well! :D