I had this crazy idea just now..
 

My attachments are being served up nice and slow here lately as i hit 10k members, and over 23GB of attachments the attachments get slower and slower.

My plan.

Install one of these other http servers such as light http or something.

Bind that to one IP address on the server. Create a subdomain for images such as attach.site.com and then set the IP in the DNS configuration to the IP i've bound the light http to.

Will this work?

anyone?

Ntfu2 attachment.php still called even you store attachments in filesystem. You need light httpd and modify code.

Didnt have to modify any code.

1. Setup subdomain such as attachments.sitename.com

2. Edit DNS zone for subdomain to point to a extra IP

3. Install lighttpd and bind it to that one IP

Images are loading 1000x faster, wether thats how its suppose to be done or not :)

Did you already do it ?
How you create links at forum to this subdomain ?
And how light httpd can control attachments access with forum permissions?

how did you change so attachments.php will point to your subdomain? Im interested on doing what you did.

Thanks!

I didnt move attachment.php to the subdomain.

I simply put all the attachments inside the subdomain, and linked that subdomain to a certain IP. Then installed lightttpd to that one IP address. (lightttpd can also read from particular folders if setup correctly.)

Like i said, i dunno if this works as intended, but it speeded up Attachments immensly and dropped load due to the number of requests my site gets for the attachments.

OK, then you have two ways :
1) modify attachment link code for write out direct link : <a href="data.myforum.com/data/1/2/3/blabla">
direct link provided to user and this may be insecure in some cases..

2) modify attachment.php and setup special http server, which can serve files from pointed place.

If you are coder - do it !

i dont understand why i'd need to modify any files?

I put them all in a subdomain, and lighttpd is configured to read from that and apache is configured not to?

Is there something i'm missing?

Ntfu2 did you see any vbulletin pages at all ? :)

All links to attachments looks like <a href="attachment.php?blablabla"> .
But you need another direct link to static file or http acceleration.

You way can be useful too : modify style preferences for image url and all images like buttons,logos
will download from you light server.