Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
A page served is one page, regardless of how many posts are in the page. The software will request the entire page at once, render it, and serve it.
So more posts per page should actually decrease the hits to the server, although at the same time it will increase the processing and bandwidth used per page, so it might be a wash in the end.
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Exactly. Even if we could "optimize" this way, we'd only be increasing the efficiency but 10% tops.
vBulletin (and all the other forums) are CPU hogs by their very nature. They contain a lot of dynamic data that exists in many tables that contain hundreds of thousands (and millions!) of records. Every single page view requires the execution of a ton of PHP code, lots of looping, and 30+ database queries.
We've done everything that we can to reduce the load on the server by offloading all of the static content to a content distribution network. The only thing that the server does now is generate the actual HTML for the page. All the CSS, JS, and images come from the CDN.
We've done everything possible to optimize Apache2, PHP, MySQL, and Linux to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the hardware.
As long as we're just serving a couple of pages per second we're fine. Thats what the site does at 10 am on a typical morning. The CPU just bounces along at 10-20%. Increase that number to 5-7 pages per second and now we're at 50%. Now increase it to 10+ pages/second and we're maxed out.