I think it has something to do with database corruption on this forum in particular. I'm posting to the Gl1 forum and it's lickety split. I'm guessing that this older version of vBulletin has a database corruption issue. Unfortunately, these problems aren't exactly easy to diagnose, and they're rarely the same thing twice. (And with JSP you'll probably have more problems with memory bloat than database speed.)

Dum de dum, fixing tables and breaking databases...

Ladies and gentlemen, Jenn Kramer. Many thanks, Jenn...

Ditto, Jeff. Thanks...and thanks for the head up on issues that I should pass on to our programmers.

Jeff,
You're closest to the situation so take my suggestions for whatever they may be worth, perhaps nothing.

Before spending too much time trying to diagnose you might want to do a server restart. I know that you reported that the system is largely idle. But I have a suspicion that the message database's indexes, not the tables, may be contributing to the problem. If the indexes are maintained using ISAM or a close cousin (as many such products' indexes are) chances are that they are mainly resident in memory. The posting delay we're seeing is a typical symptom of a system having difficulty adding entries to an index. Restarting the server will clear memory and restarting the bbs may enable the indexes to be rebuilt from the tables.

Again, just an idea from afar. Thanks for your efforts on our behalf and good luck!

I already restarted MySQL several times and repaired the tables (and vBulletin seems to have some bugs there, too, the tables are a mess), to no avail. I'm hoping that the newer version of vBulletin has some fixes. I'm betting that they're trying to clean up the tables on every post, which is taking forever. Perhaps the new version either has a cleaner way of doing it, or doesn't do it at all. (But I haven't heard back from vBulletin yet.)

I did manage to dump all the tables to a backup, so if worst comes to worst I can just re-install from scratch.

Seems to be working *much* better now... many thanks. This fix should hold until we're able to upgrade to the most recent version of the forum software (within the next week, hopefully).

Much better!
Thanks Jeff, thanks Chris.

Very nice. Thank you, Jeff!

Hey, this isn't really a problem. I write my post, hit the Submit button, go to work, and when I come in the evening, it's posted! So.....is it not supposed to work that way? :)

Cheers

Faster than an aussie to a free beer. Thanks guys