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We’ve been working hard at improving performance of the vB5 Beta. We’ve identified a lot of areas for improvement and have made a lot of progress. We aren’t done yet, but here are a few things that you will see coming up.
Reduced query counts.
While we are primarily focusing on metrics around page load time and server load, one of the ways we are reducing those is by reducing unneeded queries. We’ve increase storing data locally to avoid pulling the same data multiple times in a single page load. We’ve also improved batching of queries to reduce the number of queries needed to pull similar records. You’ll see this most around fetching parsed bbcode from the cache and url generation. We’ve also improved external caching of data to avoid repeating expensive operations every page load. The most interesting work has been done around user permissions which are needed every page load and can be complicated to generate.
File System Cache
Originally we had two cache solutions: the DB cache which is intended as a lowest common denominator solution and memcache which a lot of people won’t have access to. We’ve introduced a filesystem cache now to split the difference. It only requires that you be able to write to the filesystem (if you have multiple webservers then all servers need to write to the same location – we recommend memcache when using multiple webservers) and it will remove the load on the database associated with DB caching.
JS and CSS
We’ve started to take a look at the javacript and CSS with an eye towards reducing the number of files and reducing the total size of code downloaded. This is still in the early stage so I don’t have a lot of information to share.
Templates on the Filesystem
We’ve started work on allowing servers to cache the compiled templates on the filesystem. This should not only reduce the load on the DB, but it will also allow us to use require instead of eval to process the templates. The advantage of that is opcode caches such as APC will be able to cache the parsed php code (which it can’t do with eval) providing some additional performance.
Bottom Line
In our internal testing we’ve seen substantial reduction in both Query counts and page load times (which is the metric we are focusing on). These changes will be out shortly on the vB Demo site and for download in the beta. We’ll continue to work on performance issues based on the data we get from the Demo site and feedback from the community.
Kevin
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So ive had problems in the past with my host so they upgraded us to dedicated for free. For a month or so we have been flying fast. But now the pages load really slow intermittently. Its inconsistent....
vb team to concentrate more on support .
sorry to say, I dint felt any difference on support for SMF & VB. even i got speed replys on SMF community.