[mute]

Originally Posted by azn_romeo_4u

Your server is better than mine in terms of memory. I have a 2.5ghz dual quad harpertown with 4 gigs of ram. Here's what I learned. My server gets 20k visitors per day and over 5million file requests per day.

Install Memcache - brilliant. I was getting crashes the same as you "mysql has gone away" like 100 of these per day but I allocated 1 gig of memory to memcache and the messages have dropped down to like 4-10 per day.

Better HDD - Scsi for faster rpm and I/O wait. Forums that have a ton of visitors usually have high I/O wait. 10k rpm scsi drive works so much better than a normal 7200rpm sata. I ran my forum about two year ago on a Dual Xeon 2.8ghz (old 2003 models) 36gb scsi drive with 2gb ram with about 40-60% of the visitors I have now and it worked out good! But wouldn't be able to handle my website now. Scsi drives are very good. I don't have one now though T_T too expensive with my host.

Like FRDS said, httpd.conf, my.cnf, and php.ini memcache, and apc could be good. If you have 45 bucks to spare try www.litespeedtech.com I here it works very very very well. Free 15 day trail with 2 cores running.

But first I would try to increase the memory amount that you allocate to memcache if you have this installed. Since you have 8 gigs of ram, 2gigs to memcache should be good I think.

Actually, if you're just using the built in memcache functionality in vBulletin, you don't need more than 64 megabytes of memory allocated for memcache. By default, the amount of information stored in memcache by vBulletin (the datastore) is very small. Allocating more memory for memcache when vBulletin isn't storing anything but the datastore in it is a waste.