Hrm...yeah that's something wrong :-/  The MySQL database seems to run fine for a while, then just get bogged down regardless of traffic or anything else, from what I can tell.  Thanks for the report, Deejayh. 

Brett - could it be the notification code? The current core notification code was not designed to handle large groups.

@Cash - The same has occured to me but was accidentally proved not to be the case when I sent out a few hundred emails of test data while testing the database on another server :-X  It was super fast, though.  I'm definitely up for any suggestions as server admin isn't my strong point and makes me a bit grouchy ;)

Speaking of the notification code, is there a way of examining the current outgoing SMTP queue to see how many emails have gone out already, how many are pending, etc.?

I am having a similar problem (not email notifications, but some performance issues) with another server system I work with - non Elgg. For some reason the system just slows down sometime, even when not under any apparent load. 

Is there any special logging currently installed that might be taking extra time during posting only? I know you are in the middle of working on a 1.7 release - is there some debugging code in there perhaps writing huge log files for each post?

doug

Okay - time to bring this topic back to the top. The Elgg community site has been slow in general recently (last week or so?). It has been painfully slow for group posts. I frequently get connection timeouts. The post takes but I don't get forwarded to the next page.

The problem must be between the creation of the post and the forward at the end of the action. I still think it is the notification code because I notice it more on larger groups. Maybe removing this line in /engine/notification.php and see if this issue goes away: register_elgg_event_handler('create','object','object_notifications');

That or doing some profiling on this server for group forum posting...

@Cash I'll give it a try right now.  Using this as a test to gage post speed on this group.

Line removed and testing speed again.

Didn't help. Removing specific group notifications and trying again.

That was it.  I can't dig into the notification subsystem right now (and it wouldn't make 1.7 anyway) so I suppose the choice is leave the insane posting speed or disable notifications for group discussion.  Thoughts?

Duh. I wasn't thinking. The group notifications run off an annotation event not a object creation event!

RSS feeds are better for following group discussions IMHO.

Is it the email sending code, the site notification creation code, or accessing the database to grab all the relationships? We'd have to figure this out first.