[gabrielt]

Hi,

Thanks for your input. Some other place I read that Opterons give a better performance for vBulletin, unfortunately our hosting company does not provide Opteron servers. Upgrading to 4 GB may be a good option.

Also, our MySQL server is now at 0.20 load only after I upgraded from 2 GB to 4 GB. The load with 2 GB was also very high. At least here I hit bull's eye. Plus memcached made some difference.

I also switched from Pound to Haproxy. Haproxy provides a lower load and also provides a more efficient balancing, in my experience.

I also tried to move from Apache to lighttpd. During the night, when load is lighter, lighttpd was providing a lower load than Apache, but during the day load went to to the roof (5.0-10.0), so I switched back to Apache. Maybe it was just a matter of fine tuning, but I wasted a lot of time with no practical results.

Regarding the switch, I am monitoring the network traffic thru MRTG and it is peaking 12 Mbps on server 1 and 10 Mbps on server 2. The NICs are set at 100 Mbps and the switch is also 100 Mbps. I made some transfer tests and data is really being transferred at 100 Mbps between servers.

What is your forums URL by the way? I'd like to take a look to see its performance. Mine is http://forum.clubedohardware.com.br

What do you use for load balancing?

Cheers,
Gabriel.