Hello. My forum is www.computalk.net and I am hosted with HostGator. I recently got an email saying that I broke their ToS by using 25% of server CPU/memory for over 90 seconds. They say that if I don't sort out the load problem then I will have to upgrade to a dedicated server, which I cannot afford. Is there any ways that I can reduce the load from the vBulletin forum? Thanks Calum
If you have GZIP enabled, disable it. Install a Cache system. Disable any unneccessary features, check the server settings on your adminCP, I believe you can configure the forum for less CPU usage and abit higher loading time. - Meti
Now that shouldn't be causing any problems. If you have a lot of plugins (products) installed, in excess of 50 or so... think over it, do you really need them ? Remove the ones that are not really necessary. Enable the debug mode, and browse some sections of your forum like forumhome, forumdisplay, showthread, member profile, and see if there are any uncached templates being used. If there are any, add them to the template cache, which will save you some extra queries. Set the GZip compression level to 1. And if it is already at 1, then disable it. In your AdminCP, use the 'Repair / Optimize Tables' option under the Maintenance setting group, to optimise all your vBulletin tables. If you have not already done, move the Attachments and User Pictures from the database to the file system. Prune your soft-deleted posts. (or even clear them all). As I've read on a vB related forum that 'Too many' (ie, say.... hundreds or thousands) soft-deleted posts are known to cause some issues. If you are already not using the 'Fulltext search engine' for your forum, set your vBulletin to use it instead of vB's inbuilt search functionality. I hope this helps.
Greats tips you've got there, Loco ! Seems like I have used majority of the tips/tricks mentioned there for my vB Forum except some like restricting search engine crawling thru robots.txt Thanks.