Interview with eva2000

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  • the Sandman
    Senior Member
    • Jul 2003
    • 1539
    • 3.7.x

    Interview with eva2000

    We've just published our Interview with eva2000 - vBulletin Server Optimisation Guru. Check it out Here!

    What are the common mistakes you see admins making?

    If you role in forum owners interchangeably with admins (forum admins & system admins), there a few common mistakes I see:
    • Sticking with aging and very out dated server hardware out of plain fear in migrating forums to new servers or web hosts. One recent client I was working with had an aging Pentium 4 server and was paying monthly server rental fees which were nearly 8-10x times what the going rate for that old server fetches. They were constantly having performance issues with their vBulletin forum which affected their advertising revenues. I was brought into consult and analyse their current vBulletin forum usage profile, advise and migrate them to a more appropriate server hardware and web host. Monthly costs wise, they ended up paying 5-10% more than their old Pentium 4 server but got a 10x times boost in performance for their vBulletin forums along with the addition of a sorely missing proper dual backup procedure in place for their forum data. The client now has the server hardware and web host who are equipped to handle their future growth easily with the added peace of mind that their forum data is adequately backed up.
    • On the other side of the coin, there’s forum owners forking out massive amounts of money on very high end hardware which is overkill for their forum usage requirements or might not perform any better than a properly matched and selected server hardware. One example is server processor selection, 64x cpu threads running at 1.8Ghz vs 16x to 24x cpu threads running at 3.6Ghz.
    • Then there’s middle of the road situation where the forum owners have all the adequate resources needed to meet their forum usage requirements, but are under utilising these resources due incorrect or non-optimal settings or hardware configurations. Three examples, having a 30GB sized forum MySQL database and 64GB of memory installed but only allocating 1GB of memory for MySQL server usage and wondering why MySQL server performance is poor. Or having a 4x hard drive raid array setup, and not verifying that the raid array was correctly setup and performing as it should be. In one case I had a client who’s web host didn’t correctly configure their raid array and only one of the hard drives was actually being used in a non-raid standalone manner while the other hard drives were sitting idle. Last example where a client had paid for dual Intel Xeon processors, and only 6 months into using this server and until I was hired to consult for their performance issues did I find they were only given a single Intel Xeon processor and that it was a lower model than the one ordered. So effectively they were paying for processors they never got to use! This goes back to that first 50% in terms of optimisation in making sure what server hardware and resources you have, are working optimally and as intended.
    • For system and forum admins in general, not properly monitoring hard drive and partition space usage. Do you know your rate of hard drive and partition space consumption? How much time do you have until you need to start looking into hard drive capacity upgrades? One of the worse cases would be having MySQL database corruption and having not enough free hard drive space on any partitions to perform MySQL database repair and recovery procedures

    .
    The Admin Zone - Resources for Forum Administrators
    Articles - Forum Review
    Interviews:
    KierScottJerryAndreasSteveWayneJakeFlorisLogicianErwin
    Paul M
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