We have been experiencing horrible slow downs and crashes in Arrowchat lately. Last Friday we have 270+ users in a chat room (we use the popout as an embed) and the whole thing would suddenly go blank or the buddylist would disappear, or it wouldn't even load in the first place and give us a "cannot not connect to database" error. I messaged support but they aren't responding and we are getting very nervous as we have more events with 300+ people in each one coming up.
Our server is ABSURDLY overpowered for this. 8 CPUs and 32GB ram on AWS EC2 with EBS storage that's also absurdly large.
We already use the push service which is great for messages but absolutely useless for the CONSTANT querying of the buddylist and room data. This is where things are breaking down. The database is churning as fast as it can but there's thousands of queries going on all the time.
Arrowchat has a great interface and we would hate to lose it but this chat system is costing us a small fortune to host because it's an absolute hog on resources.
Arrowchat support *claims* that it can handle thousands of users but I can't see how that could be possible unless there is some type of server optimization that can be done that has never (as far as I can see) been shared with anyone else on the forum or in the documentation.
Does ANYONE here know any tips or tricks to optimize MySQL and PHP (we are on an nginx server running PHP FPM)? Would greatly appreciate any advice.