Performance Hacks... Please advise
 

I run a huge vB site. We currently have 2,300 users online at this very second. 80,000 members are registered there.

Our board has no hacks installed. I have found it nearly takes a supercomputer to get the forums working at this level.

I was wondering if someone could direct me to any speed enhancements that are reliable and very stable.

I have kept from installing hacks to this point because it makes it hard to upgrade, and might open ourselves up to security exploits.

Could someone offer any ways to speed up our board? We have had to turn off ForumJump, and WhoIs Online as of late because our numbers are growing so rapidly. Jelsoft seems to be very busy with vB 3.0 and hasn't offered a great deal of help. To my knowledge we are the largest board out there, and would love to grow, but we are reading the limitations of vB at this point.

Specifically I heard of a hack that logs thread views to a temp table then dumps them to the primary database at random times. This would reduce the ammount of time MySQL is locked and allow more users to browse the board. I searched but found nothing, could someone point me to this specific hack?

<a href="https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40137&highlight=deferre d+threadviews" target="_blank">https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showt...ed+threadviews</a>

You should be aware it is still technically a beta hack.
Whilst I have installed it on my forums, I certainly would consider it a last resort solution after exhusting methods of optimising mysql.

every hack which reduces queries would help you a bit ;)

this for example is a musthave:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...hlight=queries

That is not an improvement btw.

It will actually make things worse as its dependant on the size of your tables.

And please please please realise that number of queries is not everything, its the cost of the query including read / write access to the files and the number of rows that have to be scanned.

For example
SELECT * FROM poll LEFT JOIN thread ON (poll.pollid=thread.pollid) ORDER BY dateline DESC LIMIT 1

is more costly than two seperate queries
SELECT MAX(pollid) as PID FROM thread;
SELECT * FROM poll WHERE poll.pollid=$var[PID]

Also consider posting on the Server Config forum on vBulletin.com and getting eva2000 to optimize your apache and mysql settings.

Are you running two seperate servers? If not then thats the way to go because you have alot of users online.

I remember now it doesnt use the index if you do that which causes speed problems :D

Either query is terrible unless you put an index on pollid in the thread table.