Made the million mark, so what next?
 

OK, I have a small private board, (invite only), with just 215 active members who in 18 months have hit the million post mark. All the 'safety stops' such as time between posts and searches have been disabled, (New Posts is very popular!). I've done no server optimization or mySQL tweaks. It's pretty much out of the box stuff with a few template mods and some addons. I'm running it on a hosted dedicated server, (Celeron 2.8GHz w/1GB RAM)

As we continue to grow and approach our second million posts what should I be looking at doing to improve performance and reliability so that it doesn't come crashing down around me? :) I have 6 months before the contract is up on my current server, so plenty of time to look for something more suitable if need be, although cost is an issue of course. If any of you guys could point me in the direction of further research for tweaks and optimization techniques, with suggestions of which you think are the important ones to tackle first, I'd really appreciate it.

(While I'm no idiot I have absolutely no experience with this other than installing it and keeping it running!)

208 views and not one reply!!

Maybe I should have showered. :)

if it ain't broke...

whats your board about for 208 members to post a million posts ?

But will it break? That's my fear. I certainly don't want to fix what ain't broke, but I'm starting to get a little paranoid. :)

It's just somewhere for people to shoot the breeze. It's a pretty close knit community of folks around the country. Single smilie posts are not at all uncommon. :)

for a userbase that small, i think your current sever is even a bit overkill. you could easily run that on a shared host for around $10/month. the only thing you need to worry about having enough of is space for the size of your database. maybe bandwidth if you have 100% activity 24/7 or something, but i doubt that. there's no reason to waste your money on a dedicated server IMO.

I got kicked off our $10/month shared host because we were hogging the CPU. 200 members creating 1 million posts means there's always someone online. I just get this sense of impending doom since I'm not actively maintaining the server or the vBulletin.

It's never to late to do a little maintenance. Takes time (I went down for a couple of hours with 1.4M posts), but it is do-able. ;)

But what really makes your hosting tick is the amount of traffic you get during the day, how much pressure you put on ram (mysql) and the cpu (alll other processes) and it doesn't matter if the 1 million posts are made by 200 or by 20.000 people..

Do you have any access to some statistics? I mean like the bandwidth you consume per month or a page where you can look at cpu load/memory use during you busiest moments of the day.

I dont know if my board is a big board or not, maybe medium sized? Not sure where the dividing line is, but I have a board with a little over 5000 members (1700 active) an on average getting 5200 Unique visitors per month (~32000 total visits) works out ot a little over 1000 visits a day. Monthly bandwidth is running about 25 to 30 GB per month.

I have my site on a shared server which is a 3000 Mhz Dual Xeon (2048 KB cache) with 4GB of ram. There are a total of 193 sites on this server and having no issues what so ever.