+1 Million posts forum = SLOOOWW
 

How do you guys do it?

How do you run vB with millions of posts while keeping it FAST?

It all runs on 1 server right now, and I was forced to turn off search :( ... because with search on, it's not even funny how slow it gets.

I just updated to latest 3.5.4, and without search it is even slower than before (i used to have 2.2.5 until this week).

What do you recommend I do?

The load is on MYSQL - on the forums database.

Thanks in advance for ideas, input, etc.

I am willing to setup a 2nd server if it is not a nightmare to setup 2 machines to run 1 forum "together"

switch your search system to use the mysql fulltext search engine under vbulletin options.. that should make a difference, also try out the vb datastore cache option, makes a huge performance improvement (you change that in config.php)

ahh interesting... I will try these things.

first since it is slow even without search on (!), I will try the datastore cache option and see what happens

I just saw that thjey have an optimization form to fill out (questions) and post on the official vB Server forum... I will probably try to go through that too..

Thanks. I'll post here with news, wish me luck :)

how do you enable the datastore option?

I see this:

//$config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Filecache';

if I remove the comment, my forum outputs hundreds of lines of errors (stream failed...)

make sure you chmod 777 includes/functions_datastore.php

should get rid of the errors. after doing this my server load dropped by half

also depending on how many users you have it may just be more load than 1 computer can handle. The vB optimization form should help you figure that out. usually people will start with 1 server, then move to 1 DB server, 1 web server.. then 1db, 2web.. etc

I see a functions_databuild.php and a class_datastore.php and a datastore_cache.php file

I chmod 777 class_datastore.php and tried again.
It outputs errors

then I chmod 777 datastore_Cache.php and...

No more errors! I will see if it helps with the speed... At the moment it is still slooooow...

Thanks again for helping me! I posted an "official" optimization request in the vB forum too. While answering the questions they were asking over there, I got to realize that I probably have things wrongly configured (from a performance standpoint).

How many users online? I run quiet a few sites, most of the bigger ones run on dual server setups.

yeah the file is datastore_cache.php, sorry.. I haven't changed that setting since january

usually from 200 to 400

but the thing is... I just rebooted the box and even with just 40 people on there (testing right after it booted), it still feels slow.

I remember the board being click BOOM page is loaded... we had lots of users back then too. I dont know what happened.

Zachery: how do you set vB (and the rest of the site, PHP apps and the like) to work with 2 servers?

To use two, you'd probably use one as the database server and one as the webserver. Also see this post in the Big Boards forum:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=115130

I see thanks - yes I read this thread earlier its interesting... isn't it possible to run the same vforum db on multiple servers? I know people who deploy web apps to run on many-many servers...

i feel that "Search" alone could be on its own server IMHO.. thats what was bringing speed down before

Yes, it's possible. There's a few configurations you could go with. You could have a load balancer in front of two webservers with two copies of MySQL running in a master-master configuration. Or the webserver <-> database server configuration. If you ever went with three you could do the same configuration with the webservers, only a backend database server. I'm not too sure what kind of configuration would work the best with vBulletin however.

ah great thanks for the information Xorlev

I can't seem to be able to give you a positive "rep" on this board :)

OK so I am not 100% happy with the speed still, HOWEVER by disabling the "show new rep comments and new posts" plug-in, I just accelerated my forum back to a much more acceptable speed.

:)

Since your board is already running for some time (asuming this) and you just upgraded, the database might also have become fragmented. You could try to backup the database, restore into a fresh database, and then use this new one. It might make some difference.

ah that's interesting, I didn't know about doing this... Thanks for the tip.
We are about to move to the new and fast server, so I will probably do this at the same time.

is this only useful for big boards? I got a small board... .but I still would like to optimize. even at a small size I have performance issues.