Could vBseo be causing this error on my forum?

[sfnet]

I have exhausted my vBulletin support and I have an open ticket. My purpose in posting this publicly on vBSEO is to seek others who may have had an experience similar to mine or knowledge about what might cause this problem.

Lately, my forum is VERY SLOW to receive a reply post to an existing thread (usually when quoting other material), but navigating from thread to thread, forum to forum isn't slow at all. Occassionally people would complain about receiving an error when they attempted to post a new thread. The site is on a dedicated server and its the only site operating on that server. There are 150k+ threads, 2.2+ million posts, and 46k members. The server is more than adequate to handle the traffic. In fact, the current traffic is down 20% from what it was 6 months ago before these issues cropped up.

Two days ago, a member reported receiving this error message when trying to create a new post:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 45 bytes) in /home/[mydomain]/public_html/forums/includes/class_core.php on line 3259

For the first time, I can duplicate the error at any time of day when traffic is heavy or when its light.

I created a support ticket at vBulletin. We went through the laundry list:
1. Reupload the vBulletin files
2. Disable plugins globally via the config.php file (I also manually turned vBSEO off in the vBSEO admin panel before doing this)
3. Access the site using a style with no parent

The problem persisted. I followed the same above steps, ran check the version diagnostic tool and discovered that vBulletin still looked for and checked the contents of vBseo files, which is something vBulletin said should not be happening if I am running the native vBulletin code.

Ultimately, vBulletin instructed me to create a new test forum on the same server and attempt to post the same thread throwing the error on my forum. I installed a fresh copy of vbulletin on the server and was able to post a new thread without the error.

When asked "what is preventing me from going to native vb code on my existing forum if I followed all of your steps?," vBulletin replied:

"You either still have other non-vB files installed that are affecting vB in some way (most likely), you have not completely removed or disabled your add-ons, or one of those add-ons made a change to the database that is causing this error."

That leads me to believe that vBulletin *may* be causing this error.

For your information, here are some stats:
My vbulletin version is 3.8.3
My web server is apache v2.0.63
PHP version is 5.2.6
PHP Max Post Size: 8MB
PHP Max upload size 2MB
PHP Memory Limit 128MB
MySQL Version 5.0.67-community
MySQL Packet Size 64MB

The first thing vBulletin said when I shared this information is:

The default vB does not require that much memory usage. That is due to an add-on. Also your PHP Memory Limit setting is lower than the memory your add-on is trying to use.

The options are to either start removing add-ons or increase the PHP memory_limit setting.

Unless I have to, I would like avoid masking the issue by simply increasing my this limit until I understand what is causing the problem and whether its normal. The reason I am wondering whether its vBSEO that is causing this problem is because of the changes made to the vbulletin database that don't seem to be ignored when the vBSEO is inactive.

If anyone has any information that might help me or know someone that can help out, please let me know. Thank you.

PS: I also have an open ticket in the vBSEO system so please don't ask me to do that. Mods, if I placed this in the wrong forum, please move it to its proper place.

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Responded your ticket , please supply the requested information within the ticket so we can asist you.

[sfnet]

Thank you for the quick response. I have replied. For those that might ask here, I have a Dual Quad Core Clovertown with 8 gigs of ram. We have between 350-450 members online during peak hours.

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Hello ,

As i responded within ticket , if this error is still visible when vBSEO is disabled , it is 100% caused by something else as when vBSEO is disabled within vBSEO Cp , it doesn't function at all.