approx. Traffic usage?

[firewire]

Hi everyone,

I am on the jump away from UBB (after having read their newest announcement about new licence fees) and finally sick of its enormous ressource usage.

I still need some questions answered before this vBulletin will become mine (ours) :) :

- Traffic! Traffic is a major issue with our UBB at http://www.dvdboard.de . We have around 20.000 Pageviews per day. Thus we are reaching ~20 GB traffic per month with UBB. Are there any other sites with a similiar amount of pageviews? How many traffic have you got. We MUST reduce this trafficload since we pay per GB transferred.

- Are 100 MB of SQL Database space enough? Well enough for a reasonable amount of posts ( > 15.000)?

- We need a banner rotating system. We currently use WebAdverts (cgi). PhpAds is no good for us. Will WebAdverts (simple image tag + javascript) work, e.g. in a header?

Thanks for your time and answer.
best regards
Bjoern
webmaster@dvdboard.de

[Edited by firewire on 05-16-2000 at 12:07 PM]

[WebStyles]

- Traffic! Traffic is a major issue with our UBB at http://www.dvdboard.de . We have around 20.000 Pageviews per day. Thus we are reaching ~20 GB traffic per month with UBB. Are there any other sites with a similiar amount of pageviews? How many traffic have you got. We MUST reduce this trafficload since we pay per GB transferred.

We are getting around 40-50 thousand pageviews per day now at http://www.were-here.com and have been very happy with VBulletin's performance. Our old UBB was going chugga-chugga-chugga and our whole site sped up markedly when we switched software. :)

- Are 100 MB of SQL Database space enough? Well enough for a reasonable amount of posts ( > 15.000)?

When we export all the data from the VBulletin database (with 43,000 posts and 4200 members) it's about 40 MB... Keep in mind, the same data from the UBB was about 250 MB.

- We need a banner rotating system. We currently use WebAdverts (cgi). PhpAds is no good for us. Will WebAdverts (simple image tag + javascript) work, e.g. in a header?

Again, we're running WebAdverts with no problems (javascript / image tag) on We're Here and have had no problems. :)

[werehere]

Yes, this is just better software, there is no question about it!

[firewire]

Did you have to edit the sourcecode manually to add the WebAdverts Bannercode? Or is there such a thing like a header which can be defined?

2nd: any more words about the traffic/bandwidth used? This is really important for us.

Thanks again for your answers.

[WebStyles]

Did you have to edit the sourcecode manually to add the WebAdverts Bannercode? Or is there such a thing like a header which can be defined?

No, not at all. VBulletin is template driven, and there are both header and footer templates you can stick the WebAdverts javascript in. :)

2nd: any more words about the traffic/bandwidth used? This is really important for us.

Like I said before, we average 40-50 thousand pageviews per day. I think our bandwith is somewhere in the range of 2+ GB per day (that's not all from the forum of course). Using a different system is not going to cut down on your bandwith unless you change the output of the scripts... For example, cutting down all the images you can and making your HTML mean and lean. :)

[bigsoccer tech]

as someone who just made the switch...i recommend it.

however, we got a little hairy..we have a large site. recommendation...make sure you have EXTRA RAM IN your box.


our problem was this...we didn't have enough ram for apache to spawn all the processes mysql needed. each bulletin query generates 3 processes....so we bumped up to 500 megs of ram, and upped apache to 500 max cnxns and we are good to go.

j

[Dragon]

Hmm...Huss, how big is that board of yours? It sounds like you have a dedicated server at least...I'm on a shared virtual server, and I'd worry about needing more RAM or processes, since I was hoping that vbulletin would be decreasing my resource usage, not increasing it. I'm getting only about 10,000 page views/day, but I have a lot of posts online (150 MB or more using UBB).

I was hoping that use of mySQL would decrease disk usage, though, and it sounds like that's the case.

After seeing the OpenTopic debacle, and my annual thingie expiring in another week or two, though, I'm just about ready to move. Glad I found out about this (just this morning!!!).

How easy is recovery of database data, I'm wondering? Anyone ever crash?

[werehere]

Backing up the database is easy, and my forum now takes up close to 40MB where it took up 250+MB using the UBB.

The actual ram and disk access is lower than the UBB I am sure. I believe it is the actual configuration for how much ram php has, and how much the mysql tables can use. I think that is the trick to making this faster.

[bigsoccer tech]

welll....our ram usage has DEFINATELY increased significantly. We do over 100,000 board pages a day. our disk usage i don't know yet.

[Troy Roberts]

Huss - If you don't mind my asking, what is your server? I'm running UBB on a dual 650 mhz PIII with 512 meg of ram. We're getting 100 - 120k page views per day and it's killing our server. We need to prune messages at least once a week or the UBB search kills us.

[werehere]

Huss,

That may be true depending on your setup as well. If you are running NT then it may because of how it has to run the PHP, but a Linux box utilizes is much better.

I dont know if you are running NT or not, but if so, then that may be the case.

[bigsoccer tech]

Ok guys...hope this all helps....

We are a dedicated server:

2 x PIII 750
512 Mb RAM
3 x 18Gb RAID
Linux w/ PHP and MySQL

We had 256 Mb RAM. We imported 200,000 posts. Our UBB was literally dead. The first 24 hours of the import, our vB was MORE dead. Simply couldn't handle it.

We upped our ram from 256 to 512. We made the following config changes:

APACHE: Max Connections to 500 and Max Request per Child to 0
PHP: Memory limit at 16
MySQL: Key buffer at 128 (25% of total ram), table cache is 256, temp table size is 8, sort buffer is 4

A great program to install to manage your MySQL is called 'phpMyAdmin'. And install a PHP environments script so you can see what your box is up to.


MySQL CRAVES memory. We used this advice btw:

http://web.mysql.com/Manual_chapter/manual_Performance.html

MySQL uses algorithms that are very scalable, so you can usually run with very little memory or give MySQL more memory to get better performance.

When tuning a MySQL server, the two most important variables to use are key_buffer_size and table_cache. You should first feel confident that you have got these right before trying to change any of the other variables.

If you have much memory (>=256M) and many tables and want maximum performance with a moderate number of clients, you should use something like this:

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=64M -O table_cache=256 \
-O sort_buffer=4M -O record_buffer=1M &

[bigsoccer tech]

and btw, we are using on average 400 of our 512 mb of ram. As our traffic grows, we will definately need to bump. I think we will up to 2gb shortly to give us room.


and for those of you asking, there is no reason why vB will reduce your transfer volume. you stil lhave to serve up as much html...so buy that bandwidth today.

[Edited by Huss on 05-17-2000 at 12:41 PM]