Over the years I had kept my enthusiasm for getting MyBB.com and on occassion would contact BD about the domain. Yet every time they raised their price until it hit $20k last year. Of course that’s when I began to feel it would never be bought by the project.

Years ago I had contact Chris Boulton,the project owner, and asked if I had his permission to negotiate. He had expressed that I could and he was himself very interested in the domain. We had discussed possibly splitting the price.

Well the years did pass and during those years I continued not only to use MyBB software but also run the #1 third party MyBB support and plugin forum MyBBCentral.com. I’ve  always been happy to give my gratitude to MyBB. I also run the #1 most active MyBB forum which is Alexa 6k now and recieves 20k posts per day.

Then in April 2010 I sent another contact to BD. Oddly they would send me these emails telling me 20% off for a limited time only but most I ignored. $16,000 was still way too high. However this time I shot an email back and gave a brief argument about why BD should sell to me. I recieved a call shortly after. It was a BD sales rep and we spoke for about 5 minutes and I laid down my offer and the situation.

Realistically this domain is good for no one except the MyBB Project. Any Google search for MyBB returns all mybb related pages. Their parked page was about travel and junk that I am sure made for low CTR. I just didn’t see how they could produce income. Their #1 end-user buyer was going to be the MyBB Project and it’s a free open-source project. And anyone else buying the domain could not use it commercially for forum software without MyBB sending a UDRP. So it was a stale-mate for them.

After presenting this logic and doing some name dropping (I know a few people) they began to discuss a reasonable mid $x,xxx price. Now that was a possiblity. I was willing to make a substantial donation and I know Chris was willing to fork over some cash too. My idea was the difference could be made up with donations from members.

So I created this thread: http://community.mybb.com/thread-68353.html

And so it began. All over the MyBB world donation links were setup and within a week we had over $2k in donations. The member goal was $3k and Chris and I would make up the difference.

After we had secured a certain amount of funds I had again contacted the sales rep to make a firm offer. It was lower than his initial range but nothing offensive. He accepted. I contacted Chris who held all the Paypal donations. We were given a purchase link and 48 hours till the discount would expire. Chris immediately made the payment. Within days the domain was transferred and as of today Mybboard.net now redirect to MyBB.com.

This is amazing news for the project. No longer is MyBB on a second rate domain. Even MyBB.net or MyBB.org would be better than MyBBoard.net. It was a confusing and lower than acceptable domain. In comparison how many go to SMF.com only to find after a Google search they are simplemachines.org. To compare other projects like VB and IPB do not have their short .com domains. Only phpbb.com does but now so does MyBB.com and it’s even shorter.

The purchase of MyBB.com imho shows the seriousness of the project and the long term goal of being #1.

The server is a dedicated mysql server with 8gb ram and an Intel quad-core processor. It should be more than enough to handle the size of this DB. The HTTP server has no problems at all. On the sql server the load does hit about 5 during peak moments but it’s normally at 2 which is about 50% CPU usage and that’s fine.

During problem times the sql process spikes to 300% wcpu usage (75%+ of cpu). The table locks are ridiculous and I watch in horror as nothing unlocks them including repairs and flush. I was forced to restart mysql every time it locked up.

So I have been looking at solutions, talking with experts, and speaking with mybb team. I have the busiest mybb forum of them all. Some may have larger databases but mine has the most queries with about 250 per second.

It was suggested that my pipe from the http to the mysql server may be the problem. It was a possibility but imho unlikely.

Eventually I decided to try innodb tables for the 2 main tables that have locked up. They are threads table and the users table. All my tables previously were myisam with the exception of sessions. I alter my sessions table to be heap/memory for increased performance.

In order to change to innodb I had to remove fulltext search in admincp. Then alter the tables in phpmyadmin. I had to actually remove the fulltext index from the threads table as it’s used to index the subject field. I changed it from a full-text index to an ordinary b-tree index. The users table required no such alterations and was easy to convert to innodb.

The reason I wanted innodb is because it supports row level locking. Essentially in myisam every time the table is accessed it locks the entire table. You can imagine with 250 queries per second how locks can be a problem causing delays. With innodb only the actual data row is locked.

Lastly I decided to remove the full-text index from the messages column inside the posts table. It was about 350mb alone and since I won’t be using full-text search I don’t believe I’ll need it. I had not converted the posts table to innodb as it’s not actually updated as often as threads or users.

The threads table is updated with every view with this query:
UPDATE mybb_threads SET views = views+1 WHERE tid=xxx;

The users table is updated constantly from the timeonline function of mybb inside class_sessions. I had altered this function but it had little effect at the time. I’ll most likely undo my changes.

Now onto the results of my innodb and full-text alterations.
Previously mysqld was using regularly 200% wcpu.
After changes mysqld is using 25% wcpu.
Previously server load was 2+
Currently after changes load is .2

This is a 1000% increase in performance and I am hoping resolves my problems. I hope my information has served to help others with active MyBB and performance problems.