I've been using phpfreechat for over a year now. Very easy to use. Not major problems either. About a month ago I upgraded to version 1.3. Suddenly more people started getting timeouts. It seems to happen more often if people have slow network connections (3G mobile connection, for example), but the new version definitely made it worse. It happens even if there aren't many simultaneous users (the user amount generally varies between 5 and 35). I tried raising the timeout threshold to 45 seconds, but it didn't help at all. Today I finally downgraded to 1.2 and problems are gone again.
I'm using mostly default settings:
$params["isadmin"] = false;
$params["language"] = "en_US";
$params["theme_path"] = dirname(__FILE__)."/themes";
$params["theme"] = "msn";
$params["height"] = "350px";
$params["max_nick_len"] = 20;
$params["max_msg"] = 10;
$params["timeout"] = 35000;
$params["startwithsound"] = false;
$params["skip_proxies"] = array('censor', 'noflood', 'log');
$params["quit_on_closedwindow"] = false;
The version history says that 1.3 has some optimizations, but why does it seem to make things worse?