Memory spikes

[enderandrew]

I'm running bbPress 2.1-rc2 on WP 3.4.1 with Buddypress 1.6-rc1 on Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.4.

I've disabled very unnecessary plugin in Wordpress and I don't seem to issues with other areas of my site, but attempting to load any bbPress pages always causes memory spikes. A single request to load the forum front page causes memory usage on my server to jump 300-400 MB. A few people hitting the forums at once literally causes my server to crash.

Even if only one person is hitting the forums at once, half of the posts don't successfully post due to PHP memory errors. The post will go into the Buddypress activity stream but not the forums.

[johnjamesjacoby]

Thanks for the report. Do you have anything in your logs to indicate what's causing this? Are you confident it's bbPress, and not BuddyPress?

[enderandrew]

I cranked my Apache logs up to debug and I'm still not seeing anything really useful. I might look into a PHP profiling tool like xdebug, though I haven't used one before. I also cranked my Apache settings way down to:

StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 5
MaxClients 20

That's pretty much a recommended setting for a 256MB VPS, not a 2GB VPS and I can barely get buy without running out of memory. However, the symptom of disappearing posts is still happening even without running out of memory.

However, on a lark I decided to go through my posts table and all the forum posts that seemingly never successfully posted are there in "pending" state.

I think Akismet is configured on my site to leave comments as pending if Akismet flags them. Could this be that?

Edit: My Akismet stats show they've been marking comments as spam, and no one has been commenting on actual posts yet. The site isn't really launched. It does look like Akismet is just flagging most of the topics/replies on my forums.

If so, is Akismet flagging most of the forum traffic because of an issue with how bbPress uses it, or is it an Akismet problem?

I use Cloudflare as a CDN, so the requests are coming through Cloudflare's IP address. Would Akismet flag things as spam just because of a proxy IP address?

[johnjamesjacoby]

It's completely possible it's something on the Akismet side, but it shouldn't leave anything in a 'pending' state - they should be marked as spam. bbPress does use the comment moderation tools to put topics and replies into pending, so if you have moderation settings there, they will be applied in bbPress 2.1.

[enderandrew]

I'm closing this as it doesn't appear to be a bbPress bug.

[johnjamesjacoby]

Phew. Any idea what is causing it? :)