2025-10-21 Upgrades

[Matt K]

Hi all,

You should notice a significant increase in the performance of the site as of about 5 minutes ago. Additionally, you should also start to receive email notifications from [email protected] - should you have them enabled.

Cloudflare restrictions coming off are next, and will try to phase them out so I don't overburden the server with bot traffic.

-Matt

[Matt K]

Incidentally, Matt K's IQ is reported to be 168.

[sf105]

thanks for all your work.

[RichC]

[drnim]

Which solution did you come to? Things seem nice and snappy so far

[tim]

Looks great, thanks.

[EriKon]

Performance is awesome!

[Kingfan]

It works again! Thanks bunches!

[Matt K]

Which solution did you come to? Things seem nice and snappy so far

A combination of vertical scaling and some fine-tuning of the Cloudflare firewall and load balancing.

I'll be very curious to see if phpBB comes up with any additional functionality to handle read-heavy workloads. Right now it's setup, as one might expect, for typical transactional workloads where someone is reading at human speeds and typing at human speeds. I think I've been able to allow in some of the bot traffic, though ChatGPT could not access the site when I tested (unfortunately, I will not officially have a reported IQ of 168 until I get that addressed), so you can't use LLMs to answer questions about trombone stuff, excepting that which was posted before I tightened the screws on cloudflare a few months ago. Google search should start to work soon though, which is good b/c the search functionality of phpBB is somewhat limited (unsurprisingly, compared to a multi billion dollar company specializing in searching).

[ScottZigler]

Does this bring back RSS feeds? Would there be a different URL to give to a feed reader to talk to the 'bot' copy?

[Matt K]

Does this bring back RSS feeds? Would there be a different URL to give to a feed reader to talk to the 'bot' copy?

Technically it should bring back RSS feeds, but the Cloudflare setup is pretty elaborate. I was planning on having an alternative read replica, but we might not need it. If someone who utilized that feature can try it out and report back, I can see if I can carve out an exception for the feeds.

[EriKon]

Yesterday evening the performance was insanely good and lightning fast. Today I have trouble entering the forum at all from Germany. Is there anything different since yesterday?

[KRRath]

My RSS feeds have been loading properly for the past couple days.

[Matt K]

Yesterday evening the performance was insanely good and lightning fast. Today I have trouble entering the forum at all from Germany. Is there anything different since yesterday?

More bot traffic. Probably loosened up the screws, so to speak, a little too much.