[Kentaurus]

Originally Posted by pr0team.net

Hello,

Anyone have big boards tips & tricks for vbulletin big board (ajo.pl) ??
Before post this theard, i search in this forum without results.

I had to do a lot to have my forum running smoothly. Vbulletin is a great product, but add traffic and a lot of posts... and you'd better have a good server and do some optimization. I run CemZoo.com, an Anime/Gaming community for Spanish speakers, currently with somehow ~4M posts and ~50k members.

First... If you haven't already, posting a thread in the server optimization forum at vbulletin.com is a good idea. Some fine tuning of the mysql and apache parameters can help a little. And a lot more if you have never given mysql some tuning.

A good server helps... it's often not enough. I found that with an IDE/SATA drive the hard disk was constantly a bottleneck. A fast disk helps, a lot. But if you need to decide between adding more RAM and a fast disk, I'll always go with more RAM. Anything less than 2Gb of RAM is not enough for running a large forum.

Apache seems to come short for larger server loads. I recently tried litespeed, and other lite web server solutions. They helped. They can reduce the load of the server a 30 o 40%, that's really nice. Apache is a good server, but somehow litespeed runs faster specially when processing a lot of php.

Do not run php without a cache or accelerator, eaccelerator, mturck cache, x-cache... you can do some homework and check which one is better, or which one you like most. They do the work of compiling php. The cache alone reduced the load of my server by 50%. I use eaccelerator.

Install an image server... I serve dynamic content with one web server, and the images with another web server. Of course you need two servers or at least two IP addresses for doing this. By doing this you can turn keepalive off on your main server (that servers dynamic content), and have a server dedicated to static content that can also be cached for a long time (like images).

If you can afford it, separate the database from the web/content server. Have apache/litespeed run in one server, this server needs a lot of processing power. Have another server run the mysql database. This server needs a lot of RAM and a fast disk. You can even load-balance the sites this way.

I do archive posts. I only keep 3 months or less. That's like 600,000 posts. I had to do that when I had millions of posts that were never read, and were keeping mysql busy especially with searches. I keep two forums, one for the main, updated, recently read content, and another forum with the archived content. I use a custom-solution for my archiving needs. And I use two vbulletin licenses for this strategy.

If you are fan of hacks and mods, keep in mind performance. Never, ever, install a hack that adds a query to every page. Any hack that queries or modifies the post table should be a warning, it must be well written or it will make your forums very slow. Hacks for showthread are often more intensive that hacks for say, newthread.

Make an habit of keeping an eye on your server load and memory usage. Memorize those numbers, or at least be familiar with them, with the "usual" load of the server. After installing a hack, keep an eye on the load, if something strange happens, most likely it's because of the hack you just installed. The tiniest hack, that only adds a couple plugins can have a negative effect on performance if, for example, makes some bad regexps. Sometimes a hack can run beautifully with 10 users online, and take the forum down with 100 users.

Because of that, never install more than one modification at once, check your server, install the mod, monitor your server(s). If anything weird comes up, be ready to disable the mod.... check your server again. A test environment helps, but you'll need to test it with a heavy load sometime. Installing several hacks in a unattended way is dangerous.


Of course, this is only my experience, and some "quick tips" that I can give. Results may vary from person to person, and from forum to forum as each forum and each environment is unique Feel free to share your comments.