Speed Up Your Forums! vBulletin 4!
 

Hopefully this article will help your slow vBulletin 4 forum speed up a bit. :)

1. First of all, here are some admincp settings you can set, credit to eva2000
2. Store CSS As files - more info here

3. Enabling Datastore

To improve performance, vBulletin caches certain information which isn't updated often in the datastore, so that it doesn't have to be rebuilt every time it's needed.

Examples for this are

* forumcache - A serialized array with all the forums along with their options and permissions
* options - A serialized array with all the information set in the vBulletin Options
* profilefield - A serialized array of all the profile fields and their options.

The datastore data is stored in the datastore database table by default, but certain settings in the config.php file allow this to be saved in other places, to improve performance:
vB_Datastore_Filecache
This option saves the datastore data in the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file. Reading from the filesystem is generally less load-intensive than querying the database.

To use this option, you'll need to make sure that the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file is writable and readable by PHP. Usually this is chmod 777. Then, uncomment the following line in the config.php file.

(If your on a VPS or Dedi install XCache its faster than others. How to - Install Guide

4. Get rid of those rounded corners! Credit to Andy, original post here.
One reason vB4 is slower than vb3 is the use of shading and rounded corners. Add this to the bottom of the additional.css template and your forum will speed up considerably.
Feedback from users, saying their forum loads faster.

5. [S]Install vB4 Supercharged[/S] download it here. It does NOT work on 4.0.2 PL1 just yet, we have to wait until the author has updated the modification.

6. vBulletin 4 optimize htaccess - add those contents to your htaccess.

7. Add to top of headinclude 8. Download YSLow - add the contents to your htaccess.

9. You can Improve Page Loading Time

10. Enable Remote YUI: AdminCP > Settings > Server Settings And Optimization Options > Remote YUI to YES - Prefer Google.

11. In addition to this, check out articles from one of the worlds largest webmaser forums.

Optimize vBulletin 4

If you are using Memcached servers:

Monitor memcached servers with vBulletin

Thats it! If your forums have sped up a bit please let me know, if they have not and your using a VPS or Dedicated server, request for a server optimization.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=241782
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=241783
More optimization

I said it once and I'll say it again, rounded corners don't and can not have an effect on how fast vBulletin generates a page. It's simply impossible that CSS could slow down the speed at which vBulletin retrieves data and sends it to the browser, CSS is a client side thing. What you are looking at is the speed at which your browser renders the page.

I refuse to believe this helps any until I see legitimate benchmarks.

Exactly...it depends on the browser. As Chrome and Safari usually faster (both in javascript and CSS rendering) than Firefox it can have some very small effect on the loading time BUT I agree...that's the last thing what someone should look for in a page optimization...for example Opera and IE doesn't use this property at all...nor search engine crawlers ;)

This seems to be more of a collaboration of other material as opposed to a helpful article. Looking at all the suggestions it's hard to work out what bottleneck you are actually trying to reduce. Server Runtime? Bandwidth? Browser-Rendering? In improving one, you're likely to worsen another.

- You need to explain those htaccess improvements, for one the 2 different "hacks" will simply over ride each other in some way, they may even over ride other elements if the user is unfamiliar with .htaccess and just overwrites their valuable vbSEO htaccess. You might want to mention that the .htaccess rules herewill make users cache everything for AGES; meaning if you edit a style once applying them, returning users won't ever see any updates you've made unless they do a cache refresh (ctrl + f5). Don't get me wrong, those caching parameters are pretty amazing at doing their job, props to the author.

- I agree with others, removing CSS rounded corners will only speed up browser-rendering and in new browsers possibly not even that much - actually not even at all in Internet Explorer.

- To be effective, you need to come up with ways to speed up your forum without turning loads of features off :(

- It's clear that vb4 is actually quite server intensive, so that's what needs to be worked on for most things. Some of those mods, like the "super charged" mod you mention actually ADDS processes in that it minifies the CSS/JS to save bandwith, they'll download faster sure, but there are now extra things running on an already bogged down server. The "download faster" argument is actually pretty invalid with the above .htaccces caching rules!

- This:
Doesn't actually do much either! It only works in IE and and isn't even properly formed HTMl.

All in all this is a really low quality article.

Some of it is really important stuff. I think rounded corners may slow down page rendering on very slow, outdated computers. The real problem with vbulletin is the amount of requests generated by styling and inefficient coding. All those icons, gradients, separate javascripts and css files are being loaded from one server. Take a look at yslow and see the numbers...
I have no idea why it wasn't addressed properly by the dev team (single css, single javascript! try using css sprites for the images). It was released in 2009 for ... sake! We all know the impact of number of requests on page rendering time...
So... Use CDN for static files delivery where possible. Try spreading out between a couple of subdomains. You can have one amazon s3 bucket with multiple cloudfront subdomains (ie. static1. static2. etc). In StyleVars there is a section where you define image paths - put the whole link to CF there (http including). When uploading to s3 - remember to set your expiration dates properly. This will help with consecutive page loads. Setting the header is not easy, but it is possible.
As for javascript and css optimization - I'm still looking for a solution. I've tried supercharge but I'm afraid it breaks a little too much...

wow
thanks a lot
nice collection

vbulletin 4 is so slow omg... i thought moving from 3.8 to 4 would be a big improvement but its seems they are going backwards in some areas... thanks for the tut but we shouldn't have to do this on a new product, its like getting a fast car but first take off all the windows doors and accessories before you can use it lol
My users are not impressed is ipboard a better option?:down:

Ip Board, i haven't used it since maybe 08 ? But its a good software, you want a real forum? Stick with vBulletin :)
I know its bad.

Thanks

Added a few options to the article.

Turned on the mem cache fetaure to file. Will keep an eye on this.

Also have all pictures/avatars/profile pic/attachments stored to file system.

CSS saved as files.

Anything else to consider?

Add some info to the article on the bottom, install OptiPNG :)

Some of this stuff may have some impact.

However, I still feel a lot of this has to do with client side and server side.

On the server side, there are a lot of people who are hosting their sites with big over-crowded shared hosting companies.

Consider this: when you got Windows 7, did you still run it on the same PC that ran Windows XP? no is most likely your answer.

Upgrade your host or your server - get them to tell you their server specs, and how many other users are sharing your server.

The client side stuff: Safari is the faster of the mainstream browsers to date. I've check VB4 in Safari, and am impressed with it's speed. No major issues vs VB3.8.

sometimes we don't think about who is writing this stuff in here, chop suey was only 16 or 17, some of the critic of this article is a little harsh, now looking back on his suicide its easier to see he had issues, with criticism.

I know its bad

I bought vb_optimizer pro and done with it. lol
it have saved me 98,000 queries in 2 days :D

how do you edit "additional.css"?

Measurements with Firebug showed no speed increase after removing the rounded corners.
It is a browser site rendering process and has nothing to do with the page request so the "speed effect" totally depends on the hardware specs of the visitor.

Hi there

In an effort to speed up my site, I stored css sheets as files.

However when I do that, my backgound image (in doc_background) doesn't work.

If I switch back to not storing css as files...the background image works again.

Anyway I can store css as files and still keep my background image?

Thanks

Cheers

no one?? :confused::eek:

To the top....still have this problem...anyone else?

tagged

Any new code for step 6 "vBulletin 4 optimize htaccess"?

Yes there is in my guide :P

I selected to store CSS as files and then all my editor icons disappeared.. I turned off store CSS as files and my editor buttons are back. I'd love to use this function, but gotta have the editor buttons. The button is there, and if you put your mouse over a button, the text says what it is, but the actual icon is whats gone.