Joomla forum is the place to get free technical Joomla assistance, to learn a lot about Joomla (just read questions & answers), and to help out your fellow Joomla users (please share your knowledge!).
Since 2005 the forum has grown both in users and posts. With over 2.6 million posts, by more than 520,000 users, our forum is still getting bigger and bigger. Despite the various anti-spam techniques that we have implemented, the forum still seems very popular by spammers. We have banned almost 50,000 spammers since 2005.
When our forum experienced extreme heavy traffic the forum software phpBB3 automatically shut off some resource intensive processes. One example is the Advanced Search. The regular Search is using Google and does not require that much resources. The last couple of months the forum traffic seemed to have increased even more and the Advanced Search often displayed the message: "Sorry but the board is temporarily unavailable, please try again in a few minutes."
To solve that problem, our sponsor of Joomla's infrastructure Rochen increased the performance of Joomla Forum by adding a second frontend webserver combined with a load balancer. For the geeks among us: Both frontend webservers are 8 Core Servers, one with 18Gb Ram, the other 22Gb. Behind those 2 webservers we have a third server for the mySQL database. All of this sits behind the Load Balancer now. So 3 servers in total behind the load balancer just for the forum!
The server upgrade was done last weekend, and has indeed increased our forum's performance. At the same time we had some "teething troubles": due to a technical setting some regular forum users have been automatically added to the ban list accidently (oops, sorry if that has happened to you! We've solved that!). And some phpBB3 pages resulted in MySQL errors. Both problems have been addressed properly so the forum should be running smoothly now... However if you encounter forum problems, please post a message in Sites & Infrastructure - Feedback/Information.
Furthermore we have implemented a couple more anti-spam techniques. Hopefully this will decrease the amount of spam, and saves our great team of forum Moderators some work and time. Unfortunately we can't prevent all spam so in case you encounter a spam message, please report it (by pressing on the icon).
Thank you Rochen for supporting the Joomla project with the extra 3rd server for the forum! Further thanks go to Ben, Jason and Brad (Baker) from Rochen for installing & configuring the extra server & load balancer, and to David Colón (phpBB3) for his technical phpBB3 support!