Internal company forum

[Wayne Luke]

From a computer hardware viewpoint, for a fairly high content forum with a lot of threads and channels, I can have a server set up with anything from an AMD ryzen 4 core to a full blown Threadripper 16 core processor with 32 threads. Assuming I run the forum software under a 64 bit linux os:

a) Roughly how many threads can the software support ? 1, 4, 16 , 32 ?

b) Is the database loaded into RAM when running, or resident in the HD, making the SSD drive response time the primary consideration for performance? I ask because it is possible to get some very fast access SSDs that mount right to the motherboard slots vs going through the conventional HD interface in needed.

c) I am assuming that there isn't any significant vector processing (video card based processing) going on, but of course that can be added fairly easily.

Thanks

Harry

All of these questions are irrelevant to our software. vBulletin is not a server-based application. It is a series of Web Scripts that runs on top of an Web Server and Database Server platform. You would control the use of CPU threads and how the database is saved through the configuration of Apache and MySQL. Not through vBulletin.

You'll need to optimize Apache to properly handle threads. MySQL's documentation has information on where to store the database. You will probably not want to store it in RAM though. That is volatile. An SSD should be sufficient.

vBulletin makes no use of graphics processing that would need any access to a video card. The end-user's browser might since vBulletin's output is just HTML.

[HarryN]

Thank you for the insights.

There are three forums that I frequent that run older versions of the vBulletin software.

candlepowerforums.com (relatively lower traffic)
cnczone.com (relatively higher traffic and a lot of sub forums / channels )
sprinter-source.com (modest traffic)

Using these as examples, the sprinter-source response time is pretty fast / acceptable for our needs.

The cnczone.com is far too slow for our needs, especially during busy times, but is closer to the size of forum we will be operating for our business as it grows, but no adv. It routinely takes 5 seconds to do anything on that site.

Can you give me some insights into what factors cause the cnczone site to operate so slowly?

I guess more to the point
- what resources are needed to run a site that large with fast response times?
- Is this feasible using your hosted service or do I need to hire someone that is an expert to optimize our own dedicated server?
- Is VB 5 faster than these older versions, or at least planned to be in the future?

I hope these questions make sense. It isn't the price of the software that drives our decision, it is the long term capabilities to provide a fast responding site.

Keep in mind we will be uploading a lot of attachments.

Thanks for your assistance.

Harry

[Wayne Luke]

cnczone.com is a modified version of our software. Having addons like they do will impact the speed of the site. Other than that it all comes down to hardware and the server software. They could also be using older versions of PHP and MySQL. There could be other websites running on the same hardware. If they are using low cost hosting, there could be up to 1000 websites on a single webserver. vBulletin has a lot of methods to optimize performance. I don't know what resources they have available on their server.

This site is larger than CNCZone.com. We use two webservers, a database server, Sphinx Search, and Memcached to improve perfomance. Our cloud sites use a scaled virtual server architecture so the resources change based on demand. They use multiple webservers, multiple database servers, and memcached to improve performance.

For a large volume site, you will want at least to separate the web server and database server and use Memcached. As time goes on, you can cluster your database and add new webservers if necessary. You should plan on at least 2GB of RAM per processor core if you're running your own dedicated server. So a 16-core CPU would have at least 32 GB of RAM. Using SSD instead of Platter drives can improve database performance but you'll want commercial quality drives, not consumer drives. If you offset keyword search to Sphinx Search you can also gain perfomance. For the software, I recommend using Apache 2.4.3X, PHP 7.2.X, and MySQL 5.7.X for the best performance. MySQL should use INNODB tables with the UTF8MB4 character set. There are many tutorials on the internet on optimizing these software packages. Some customers will also use a CDN for static resources such as images, fonts and javascript files. Though with a default installed of vBulletin 5.4.1, image use is very light. Only a few icons and the logo are images in a default install now. Your largest storage requirement will probably be any file attachments made on the system. This site uses a database that is smaller than 10 GB.

The software also has a variety of features to help improve performance. Most of these are turned off by default but support can help you with them after purchase.