What magic are you all doing?

[emilyoddish]

Our site has been growing by leaps and bounds. We are around 500,000 posts and we have around 200 online users almost at all times. Our current host is shaking in the knees and is so slow because we can't handle the load. We're on a dedicated VPS with 4 cores 3gb of ram. We're only using around 120gb of bandwidth and our database is 1.5gb on cPanel/WHM.

How are you guys hosting your sites? What magic are you doing? We're struggling trying to find an affordable option. Please tell me how you do this and whom you use. We're a group of role-players whom like to discuss it. Our members are extremely loyal and we really want to make our site stable.

So, please, recommendations are very much welcome.

We're role-players, and we support Harry Potter stuff and all. We really want to know what kind of magical world magic you are all using to make your technology to work. We really need it. :( Seriously, we think you are all doing magic.

[Nevo]

I have sent you a Personal Message within regards to your struggle. :)

[Sefket]

Make sure you don't have a lot of hooks as it will make your site load slow.

[emilyoddish]

Hi Sefket, we disabled all the hooks before didn't help very much. Pretty much just a sidebar system.

And, thanks for the hosting PM's, but, we really want to know what you guys are doing to make your site sustainable, not offers of hosting.

[Sefket]

Hi Sefket, we disabled all the hooks before didn't help very much. Pretty much just a sidebar system.

And, thanks for the hosting PM's, but, we really want to know what you guys are doing to make your site sustainable, not offers of hosting.

Well, it usually depends on your hosting company. One of my clients used a company and they kept making him pay more for RAM and his site barely loaded. I moved him to another hosting company (I manage his site) and his site is loading so much faster.

Can you PM me your site please?

[3DKiwi]

I paid .gary to optimize my dedicated server. Dual core 3gb memory. It will happily run with up to 500 users on-line.

If you're like me many of the users are search engines. You can slow them down by adding a delay to robots.txt. Also Google (main offender) can be slowed down by adjust it's settings in Google Webmaster account. If you haven't got one of those you should.

3DKiwi

[Sefket]

I paid .gary to optimize my dedicated server. Dual core 3gb memory. It will happily run with up to 500 users on-line.

If you're like me many of the users are search engines. You can slow them down by adding a delay to robots.txt. Also Google (main offender) can be slowed down by adjust it's settings in Google Webmaster account. If you haven't got one of those you should.

3DKiwi

And also make it so Guests can't view member profiles. Also add like a 30 second delay for people to search stuff on the website.

[surinp3]

Our site has been growing by leaps and bounds. We are around 500,000 posts and we have around 200 online users almost at all times. Our current host is shaking in the knees and is so slow because we can't handle the load. We're on a dedicated VPS with 4 cores 3gb of ram. We're only using around 120gb of bandwidth and our database is 1.5gb on cPanel/WHM.

How are you guys hosting your sites? What magic are you doing? We're struggling trying to find an affordable option. Please tell me how you do this and whom you use. We're a group of role-players whom like to discuss it. Our members are extremely loyal and we really want to make our site stable.

So, please, recommendations are very much welcome.

We're role-players, and we support Harry Potter stuff and all. We really want to know what kind of magical world magic you are all using to make your technology to work. We really need it. :sad: Seriously, we think you are all doing magic.

We have about the same specs on trafic.
500000 posts, 200 users, but about 520 Gb bandwidht usage per month,

I have 8Gb ram, quad core.

I upgraded from 4 Gb ram to 8 Gb about a year ago and many problems with speed were solved by this.
So maybe add some more ram and see what happens?

[Sefket]

I have 2GB RAM and my clients sites run perfectly with 300 users along with 1M+ total post counts. 4GB is not needed.

[Nevo]

Dedicated CentOS Server, hosted in Canada in Quebec so I don't have to comply by United States Bullfaeces Laws thank you very much.

Server specifications are running Web Host Manager (cPanel Full) with Two INTEL XEON Quad Cores, 4.26GHZ Total, 18 GB DDR3 RAM, 2000GB Hard Disk Space, 20TB Bandwidth Per Month, 100MB/s Port.

Currently, this server hosts many many invision power boards ranging from different versions and the server is optimized for this type of operating system. Server on average has over 1000 users per minute and can handle thousands more.

[Feld0]

I run a dedicated box with these specs:

• quad core Intel Xeon E3-1230 @ 3.2 GHz
• 32 GB RAM
• 2 SSD's in RAID1 (for the OS, cPanel/WHM, Minecraft servers, and MySQL databases)
• 2 HDD's in RAID1 (loads of storage space for everything else)
• 100 Mb/s port
• CentOS + cPanel/WHM
  

I've tuned MySQL with some very generous caching settings (great way to take advantage of all my RAM!) which makes for some absolutely killer performance when combined with the RAID1 array of SSD's. Database access is usually the bottleneck responsible for slow page loads, and my setup virtually eliminates it. I use FastCGI as my PHP handler along with APC as an opcode cache, which caches most of a site's code in RAM and means the hard drive array is generally accessed for static files and attachment downloads. And on that note, I've offloaded my static files to an SSD-powered content delivery network (CDN). Yes, I threw hardware at the problem, but this is about as good as the performance is gonna get; and I have so much hardware at my disposal now that I'm able to share the speed with my clients at a relatively low cost.

The stats of MLP Forums are similar to yours (bandwidth usage is, however, around 400 GB/month and my database is over 2 GB). I use quite a generous number of hooks and add-on applications, and host a slew of clients' sites, Minecraft, and SRCDS game servers on the box as well. The load of the entire machine hovers between 10% and 20% and RAM usage is quite stable around 7-8 GB throughout the day. I'm quite confident it can handle a few thousand users at once if need be.

It's a blazing-fast setup and the Xeon E3-1230 in particular is a very impressive CPU. Almost every client I've gained has commented positively on the performance, and a couple of them chose to share this box with me over getting their own VPS.

So... to summarize, this is the bulk of what I did:

• get a dedicated server with a modern, high-end CPU
• put databases on an SSD array
• tune MySQL to take advantage of the available RAM
• use FastCGI to run PHP in a persistent manner
• use APC to cache compiled PHP in RAM to minimize hard drive I/O and avoid recompiling hundreds of files on every pageview
• use a CDN to serve static content (this offloads about half a million requests from my server every day; none of my clients use one, however, and their sites perform very well, too, so consider the CDN optional)
  

End result? Sub-quarter-second page response times, no noticeable slowdown as the online user count rises, and plenty of room to host lots of sites and game servers alike.

I hope this helps out. I dealt with some strange slowdown issues myself during my career with VPS's, but I couldn't be happier since I moved to a custom dedicated server. This server's speed, combined with the tuning, really does feel magical. :sorcerer:

On a side note, I'm curious to take a look at your site as well. Please feel free to PM a link to me and I'll do my best to offer you some specific advice for your situation.

[Elly]

Since you're using cPanel I suggest something along the lines of:
Using Easyapache
- Apache 2.2
- PHP 5.3.x
- xcache
- suhosin
- mod_ruid2

Databases
- Use MariaDB instead of stock MySQL. You can do this with cPanel, just disable MySQL upgrades in settings.
- InnoDB for all tables
- innodb_key_buffer > database size
- Memory for sessions table
- Remember to set an inline notifications table limit in ACP for each member group or you may end up with a very large table (5GB in our case)

Instead of using suphp, mod_ruid2 with mod_php solves any permission issues, while also enabling use of opcode cache like xcache.

Then add in nginx proxy in front using nginxcp.com plugin.

Let me know if you require specific build settings. We're pushing similar numbers to you on a quad core (mind you, it's an E3). Current load is about ~0.50

I also get very low cost dedicated servers from our DC (US/Canada/UK) so let me know if you want further details on that as well :smile:

[Rhett]

Just to be clear guys, we don't allow advertising of other hosting here, you are more than free to talk about configs, but please don't use this forum as a means to advertise your hosting services etc..

Thank you

[emilyoddish]

Okay, so apparently the node we were put in were doing great when we moved our vps over to them as they are more reputable. Apparently, thy underestimated that IP.Board is a resource hog and we kind of crashed their entire center and we're the reason why the Dimenoc datacenter was having problems. Wow. We were asked to upgrade or leave. :/ We barely can afford it now and are considering transferring our database (which we hope we don't have to) to a light weight forum system. :/ We really want to stay IPB.

[Grumpy]

Okay, so apparently the node we were put in were doing great when we moved our vps over to them as they are more reputable. Apparently, thy underestimated that IP.Board is a resource hog and we kind of crashed their entire center and we're the reason why the Dimenoc datacenter was having problems. Wow. We were asked to upgrade or leave. :/ We barely can afford it now and are considering transferring our database (which we hope we don't have to) to a light weight forum system. :/ We really want to stay IPB.

I'm going to assume that hey meant the node was having problems. Not the datacenter... I don't think a huge company like that would suffer from a website of your size.
We don't really know what/where the bottleneck for you exists. You can try to optimize and thus use less resources or you can upgrade your hardware. Given dimenoc's prices on VPS, you could also consider some budget dedicated servers. Check webhostingtalk.com to find em.

[Dmacleo]

go dedicated.
even if unmanaged and you have to learn some stuff. mine costs 5$ more then my vps did due to all the cpanel and extra ip costs. my dedictated has free directadmin and 5 ips free.
I have a lot of hook and have Exec. Time: 0.0873 or similar on heaviest page with some ads.
has handled over 1400 online (mostly guests, and not search bots) at once, which was a fluke, but I didn't even notice it.