[motorhaven]

I've been programming since 1979, sys admin since the early 90s. This is not a case of lack of experience, the system really is loaded down with VBulletin. We're quickly approaching a terabyte of bandwidth per month from the front end server. 10s of millions of page views each month, 1000-1500 users at once in the forums (except this week has been slower due to the Easter/Spring Break holiday).

Vbulletin eats up an enormous number of CPU cycles compared to the prior version. For instance, instead of having the language in the templates, language is now parsed in, adding overhead to every template built.

In the last 24 hours, I've done a few things to reduce load not directly associated with VBulletin. For one, I'm running mod_gzip and it looks like image.php and attachment.php where being compressed (avatar.php was left over from the prior httpd.conf config and is now removed). Not a huge amount of CPU overhead reduced by not compressing these, but every bit helps.

Additionally, at any given time we will have between 20-100 Google, Yahoo and Inktomi spiders crawling the site. That eats up a lot because they fetch more pages per minute than the average real user. I certainly don't want to turn them away, search engine spidering is crucial to success on the web these days....