Vbulletin 4 with Nginx performance

[fxdigi-cash]

Good day everyone,

I hope at first that everyone is doing great in his/her life!

well as you know this issue we have mostly among those who own their own dedicated server or VPS, and some hosting companies as well may provide such web server 'Nginx'.

what I want to discuss is vbulletin 4 on Nginx and far you got with both working together since vb board version 4 is somehow heavy compared to vb v.3

my question is how do you rate your vb4 on Nginx especially when it comes to browsing? how fast is it? if you measure your board speed on some online measuring tools such as tools.pingdom.com or www.webpagetest.org or even google insight... how bad or good is it?

I have been trying a lot of testing lately to see how fast and powerful it can go since I found some sites could achieve 1 sec page load speed using vb3 with Nginx when browsing any of their pages.

what about Time to first byte TTFB? how good is that?

As for me, I use vbulletin 4 on Nginx using php5-fpm with memcached enabled and the speed is at some level slow ranging between 1.5 sec to sec 2.3, and of course using Cloudflare to reduce latency and bandwidth as well as caching static files.

Still I have an issue with TTFB = 1.233 sec .... this is very bad for TTFB, not sure what causes that anyways!!

you are welcome to share your experience!! :up:

[Skyrider]

My experience is that with nginx and with no addons at all, the forums almost loads instantly. But this also depends on the database size, the server and tons of options management with vB4 that changes the loading speed, eg:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...ms-vbulletin-4

While from 2010, quite a few options are very helpful.

I've read on a lot of sites that memcached is only helpful when it is running with multiple servers, rather than one. With only one, xcache would be better. But in general I skip xcache/memcache and go with filecache when the server is running on SSD.

My 2 cents.

[fxdigi-cash]

Thanks @Skyrider for your comments.

when checking vb4 major impact, it is limited to 2 things: first is the database since it takes a lot of RAM 'multiple queries', second is the resources used on the board such as css, js and images.

now when we compare using Nginx with Apache on vb, there is a big difference in performance when it comes to concurrent connections and in this case Apache wins. However, Nginx wins when it comes to static files that you will use once upon the time and then cache it forever 'max cache'.

Here is the major impact where I experienced so far:

1- web tools that are designed to cache queries:
a- memcache 'memcached' --> memory caching system "used mostly for websites that depend on dynamic database such as forum boards 'vBulletin for example'. mainly it will reduce the RAM used by caching database queries and that's why some mods such as vboptimise is there to reduce the database RAM use.

b- Redis --> another way how to cache database and it is in fact excellent tool more powerful than memcached except that I know no one to be able to set it up with vbulletin because of the complicated coding.

c- Varnish --> possibly the most powerful caching software as it is as well an http accelerator. This tool is truly amazing as it has many other pros such as improving server and pages performance in a very noticeable way. if installed properly a vb board or any kind of forum board will be running super fast. usually admins hire some Engineer to do this job. sadly I didn't find much info about how to set it up on vb boards.

2- web tools to cache PHP:

a- APC --> Alternative PHP Cache; very common PHP accelerator that many forum admins use to speed up PHP delivery to client side.

b- eAccelerator --> used to be a good PHP accelerator, but at some point it is out-dated 'no support or improvement made recently'.

c- XCache --> another powerful for PHP acceleration; caching php file and deliver them to client-side.

d- Zend Opcache --> possibly the most powerful tool, can cache PHP and deliver them very quickly. This tool includes Zend Optimizer if necessary to web admins to maintain Zend Opcache automatically without the need to modify from time to time.


3- Using a CDN 'A content delivery network' to make forum board even faster by reducing latency, bandwidth, content delivery and minifying most resources such as css, js and html.

This is basically where I noticed the major performance change comes from. I know for sure that there might be some modules to setup on Nginx to accelerate http request, but have't done any testing on this side so far.

any comment is welcome

[Skyrider]

I found this for Varnish:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...in-share-yours

From 2011, but still might be helpful.

What about your server though? What kind of VPS / Dedicated server is it? What is your RAM / swap? CPU, cores? What kind of nginx configuration(s) are you running for nginx? And what is your main nginx configuration file? Eg, your worker_processes and worker_connections settings. And with FPM, are you using static, dynamic or on demand?

And are you using gzip?

There are so many variables with nginx/fpm that can make a huge difference on how fast your vBulletin setup will run.

[fxdigi-cash]

Thanks Skyrider for the comments, I will answer your questions as soon as I have enough time because there is a lot to explain and write. :up: