Quote:
Originally Posted by cal_guy
I've done some research and apparantly there were only 5 dual-core cpu that supported by the server, the Dual Core Xeon 2.8 Ghz which were designed for dual processor configurations, and the Xeon 7020, 7030, 7040 and 7041 cpu which are designed for multiprocessor configuration. Amazing all 5 are still apparantely still available from Intel although obviously you have to get them from a major distributed like Techdata and there probably insanely expensive. There also available on ebay and the 2.8 ghz version is "reasonable", with the cheapest one going for $125. Obviously no point unless you replace both CPU.
Of course talk of replacing CPU might premature since the server has a lot of room to add memory and as photon said memory is cheap, would adding memory be effective?
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We've got lots of memory. We've still got 40% of the memory free even when the CPUs are pinned.
There are two big problems that are inherent to virtually all web forums:
1) Every single page view results in a dynamically generated page. When your database contains close to 2M posts (and growing), this is expensive on the CPU side.
2) The developers insist on tracking sessions even when visitors are unauthenticated. If they didn't, then we could setup a reverse proxy cache and serve pages out of the cache to unauthenticated users. That would dramatically reduce the load on the server.
We're doing everything that we can to make the generation of pages as efficient as possible. All the internal VB caching is turned on, and we're run xcache to do PHP op code caching.
What it really comes down to is horsepower. If you want to run a big forum with a lot of posts and capacity for a lot of concurrent visitors then you need some serious horsepower. We had serious horsepower. We no longer have serious horsepower.
The server that we currently have was good bang for the buck 3 years ago. It was a relatively powerful server in 2006. And it was more than adequate for most of the peaks that we were experiencing in 2006. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the load on the server has increased and now its not entirely up to the task during peak periods.
All vBulletin forums come to a point when they are forced to go the multi-server route. I think we're pretty much there. To facilitate further growth we really need to be considering the following:
1) At least a 10mbps internet connection.
2) Converting the existing server to MySQL only.
3) Procuring a 4-8 core xeon server with 4+ GB RAM that will run Apache 2.2 or Lighttpd only. My server OS preference is FreeBSD 7.1 for this configuration.