Multiple Forums & Opcode Caching - Cache Source ONCE for all sites

[Jafo232]

I know a lot of us in the Forum and Server Management forum are left overs from the "Big Board" forum. I have received great advice and help in here when dealing with large forums.

I was commissioned to find a way to make upgrades easier for a network of about 15 forums. As many of you know, when an upgrade is released, you generally have to download the software for EACH forum separately. Then you have make sure you don't screw up and upload the wrong license to the wrong site. We wanted to find a way that we could use just one batch of source files and link each forum to them symbolically. After consulting some members at Jelsoft to see if it would break licensing and get some insight on how the license key was used, I was able to accomplish this.

It dawned on me early on that there would be a second, if not more important benefit. Instead of say, globals.php being cached for each site, it would really only be cached once. On one network I work on, there are seven busy sites (load balanced between three servers). The normal method would have seven different cached copies of global.php in memory. However, if all the sites are symbolically linked to one copy of global PHP, this reduces the memory usage by SEVEN FOLD. This thought put the project more on the front burner as server loads had been an issue on this network.

Well, I have finally released the product and methodology here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=188108

I have some great results to show (see attached graph)..

Any feedback from you all would be helpful.