Upgrading to IPS 4.4. Any advice for server configuration?

[Maxxius]

Hello everyone, hopefully soon I'll be upgrading my 3.4.6 installation to 4.4.6 which is whole another world. The server I use today with 3.4.6 was set up in 2012/2013 and I'm think a lot has changed since then and things can be configured differently, new server-side plugins/extensions/whatever can be used to ensure my forum operates quickly and reliably.

First off back in the day my admin hooked my up with a nginx server, memcache or memcached (I don't remember).

My VDS server specs are: 4 vCPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz), 16 GB RAM (RAM: 256 GB DDR4-2133 ECC-REG), Network: 1Gbps. Centos, ISPconfig hosting panel and phpMyadmin.

My forum has 380k posts and nowdays gets about 300 unique users a day. Which is a shame when it had 3000 in its hey-day. I hope to reclaim the lost traffic with this upgrade. I have all the official IPS addons and intend to use couple apps and a few small plugins from the marketplace.

I have read a lot of good replies about Redis cache. Can Redis and Memcached be used together, does that even make sense to use 2 caching mechanisms at all? Which Redis version do you recommend I get? And also Elastic search heard is good too. But which version should I get?

PHP-FPM I've read here that its good. Should I ask to get this installed? What about anything that makes the website load quickly to achieve good pageload scores etc?

Since I have a lot of RAM and not a lot of activity I've talks of things like putting mysql in the RAM for a very quick performance of the forum is that even remotely true? What can be done to take advantage of all this server RAM?

I have used the IPS requirements php file to get some info myself and I see these are in RED:

- You need PHP 7.1.0 or above (7.2.0 or above recommended). Since there is no problem for me to get any version of PHP please recommend which one to get at this moment. Is 7.3.9 stable enough? Or should I use 7.2.0?
- You do not have the cURL PHP extension loaded or it is running a version less than 7.36. Since there is no problem for me to get any version of cURL please recommend which one to get at this moment.

Any advice would be appreciated.

@Adlago @Makoto

@ASTRAPI

[ASTRAPI]

Hello Maxxius

Starting from the hardware i can guess that you can get a dedicated server instead according the prices that i know. Probably i don't have to mention the benefits from using a dedicated server compared to a Vps. Your existing hardware can handle a lot more users if you configure it correctly.

Getting a super fast server is not enough to make your forums fly as the configuration of the software is very important also !

The clock of your Cpu is not high and for the software that is not multi thread you will fill it.

My personal opinion is that when you are not using a control panel you have a lot more power on custom patches and a bit more advance tricks that can boost the performance...

I already post a few of them like: Php PGO, Dynamic TLS, Hpack e.t.c

But ok a control panel makes things easier for users to use.

On the latest Invision version Redis is much better than Memcached.

Phpfmp is the option to use yes.

You can use your ram to have Innodb buffers high enough but putting the hall database on Ram is a disaster.

For the latest version of Invision the best php to use is 7.3.x.

For cURL use the latest version.

But i think that you understand that all the above is only a small portion of what you can do to get a super fast forums and secure.

There are a LOT more on kernel level, network level, optimizations for all the software like  Nginx, php, mysql, redis, Elastic search e.t.c

You can use also services like Cloudflare to boost your performance.

Good luck !