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tspore
05-14-2008, 04:52 PM
I am running a dedicated server for my vbulletin server. Apache 1.3.x PHPv 5.x I have SAS DB, etc.
But really people are always complaining that my server is slow, so are their any suggestions to make my forum faster?
Hardware isn't the issue - Intel core 2, SAS drives, 4 GB of ram, etc.
royo
05-14-2008, 05:12 PM
Have you actually analyzed server logs and know that hardware isn't the problem, or are you just guessing? Alternatively, you could have some server management firm try to optimize your setup.

I haven't excluded problems on the server's network, so you may need to look into that.
tspore
05-14-2008, 06:53 PM
My servers are just cruising along, I would guess At most when I have 400 people or so on the forum, with all the search bots, etc, I am only pushing the CPU's at around 20%. If anyone has a professional to recommend I am all ears.
ssslippy
05-15-2008, 01:46 AM
Upgrade to the latest apache.

But post on vb.com for a server optimization.
davide101
05-16-2008, 04:39 PM
On a related note, how do you go about finding a reputable server optimization firm?
royo
05-16-2008, 04:51 PM
Get someone to recommend one to you :P. What exactly are you looking for in terms of optimization and what Linux distribution are you using?
davide101
05-16-2008, 05:06 PM
I have dedicated Linux box (CentOS 4.5) at Liquid Web. It's a Q6600 with 2gb of RAM. Things are very smooth now, but looking at a chart of our growth I can see the walls closing in on us in a few months. Before we bump up to another $1000/yr for faster hard drives and more RAM, I imagine a few hundred spent on identifying bottlenecks and tweaking settings may be cost effective. That is definitely not my forte.

I recently started heavily caching files on my sites, adding proper etags and expires headers. I cut my bandwidth usage down by 66% and cut my load in half. I learned about this from the YUI Performance stuff blog. I'm sure there are lots of other things from MySQL or Apache settings to cron jobs for pruning bloated files that would further improve our performance.
royo
05-16-2008, 06:23 PM
LiquidWeb is a managed provider as far as I know, can't you get them to do it?