Ideas to temporarily max optimize vB
 

Here's my situation...

I run a football forum. For all but 20 days a year, my weak dedicated server does an adequate job running the forum. But on game day, we're hit with lots of database errors due to the dramatic increase in traffic.

Instead of upgrading servers, I was wondering if there was anything I could do to keep my forum running on these busy days were we may have 300 members on at once.

In the past, I've turned off guest viewing which helps a little but I would love to know every CPU-hoggish feature I can turn off. What would be even better is having a hack which I could turn on which does things like turn off signatures, turns off access to guest, rss feeds, etc.

Anyone know of such a product or checklist? Thanks.

i had a client in your situation lately, a sports channel... he dealt with his host to have a special deal for high-trafic days like during the series... you can start with that, providing advertising of your host in exchange for the deal.. they usually like the idea.

other than that, closing down signatures and avatars may be the best solution... having a very minimalistic theme is also a solution...

Anyone have a list of everything that one can do to ease the CPU on a server?

Try this I made: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=199207 :)

Shouldn't be too hard to arrange. All you need is a second server that becomes available on these days. As vbenhancer says: talk to you host.

Tips to improve performance:
Use Amazon S3
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=223251
FractalizeR: VBulletin 4 extensive optimization guide (Part I) (applicable to vb3.8 as well)