My website keeps timing out with 503 errors and my webhost is telling me to table to convert the table to InnoDB?

[Forsh]

It has come to our attention that the 'xxxxxxxxxxxx table of the 'xxxxxxxxxxx' database gets locked too often. We suggest converting this table to the InnoDB database engine. You may use this guide as a reference: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/myisam-vs-inn ... heading-17

At the moment, you have the MyISAM database engine for your table - that means that each time this table gets updated, it gets locked and other DB queries should wait till the table gets unlocked. After converting your table to InnoDB, all database queries to this table will not have to wait till the table gets unlocked because, unlike MyISAM, Innodb has row-level locking.

As a result, the web requests will not get stacked due to the frozen DB queries and the requests will get processed significantly quicker.

Never done anything like this before, could someone help me understand if I really need to do this and is this hard to do if so?

[AMurray]

This is not a Joomla problem per se, but a database problem. Your web host would be best to advise you; they should be able to talk you through it or convert the database for you.

Their knowledgebase article referred to above walks you through the process. I don't think there's much more we can advise you other than what's been said in that KB article. To answer your question, YES you should convert the DB to InnoDB.

If interested, more reading on the subject here:
https://www.itoctopus.com/your-joomla-w ... -to-innodb

Basically, you need to use MySQL query such as:

Code: Select all

ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=innodb

. The "table_name" is *your database table name* as specified in the database. I believe it is also possible to convert all tables using a wildcard * character so that all tables with the same prefix are converted

Code: Select all

ALTER TABLE table_prefix_* ENGINE=innodb

Someone may correct my code syntax, but otherwise, my advice is to go back to your web host and ask them for assistance.

[Forsh]

I went ahead and did that and the website actually loads now and my CPU usage drooped from %100 down to about %20. My memory usage is running really high, don't suppose you know anything that can be done to get that down as well? Does clearing the cache regularly bring down the memory usage?

[AMurray]

I guess clearing the cache every now and then is a good thing. Not an expert so just my opinion. Clear the cache and see what your server's memory usage says. I assume you're on a VPS?

If on shared hosting, it may not make that much noticeable difference since server resources such as RAM are shared with many other websites on the same server. (Again, not an expert, don't really know how shared hosting works with regard to shared resources).