Would this server upgrade speed up my sites?

I own 5 vBulletin forums hosted together on a dedicated server. The largest and most active of the 5 is http://www.mu-43.com. My hosting company is Servint. I am very happy with them and am not considering a change.

My current server:
Flex Pro 3
Processor: 1 Octa-Core Intel Xeon E5-2640 v2
32 GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM
150GB SSD (RAID 1)
$499 monthly

Thinking about changing to this server:
Flex Enterprise v3
Processor: 2 Octa-Core Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2
64 GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM
300 GB 15K SAS Storage (RAID 10)
$599 monthly

Would this be an improvement in terms of vBulletin performance? Or would changing from SSD to 15K SAS be a downgrade outweighing the CPU and RAM increases.

Also wondering whether a Gigabit ethernet port for $25 monthly would make any difference in my sites' speed.

I think the main bottleneck on my sites is that they are photography forums, and each page can contain many MBs of images, but those images are generally hosted off-site (mostly Flickr), and I can do nothing to speed them up.

I am including this graphic from my current server in case it is relevant. I have no idea how to read it.



According to my current WHM view, load averages are 2.83 2.70 2.59. I have no idea what that means either.

Thanks for any help!

 

Your load average figures are the average load over 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes, respectively. The rule of thumb is that a load average of 1 per CPU core is acceptable (there are many other things to consider such as I/O time, RAM usage, etc.), and you should try to stay under it as much as possible, with the goal being 0.75 or less. However, if you go over 1 per core, that does not necessarily mean you will see a noticeable degradation in performance.

Load average of 2.83 divided by 8 cores gives: .35375 load average per core. So you are well within the rule of thumb. A second CPU may offer enhanced performance, but it might not. I do not think you really need a second CPU at this point.

It is a shame that SSD is not offered with the 2 CPU server. SSD is much faster than mechanical hard drives, especially when you are doing disk I/O like database queries.

Based on your graphs, your average bandwidth is about 2 megabits per second. A gigabit data connection (1,000 megabits per second) is much more than you need. Whether or not the data packets would come down faster, I cannot answer that, though I think that it is unlikely. But you are nowhere near consuming a 100 megabit per second data connection which I assume you have.

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/WBs4I/http://www.mu-43.com

Look at that Pingdom test and you will see that the Flickr files are taking the longest to download (on your main page). You are correct about that and there is nothing you can do about it.

You also have a huge amount of file requests for your home page, with 105 requests for a total of 9.7 MB. There is no way a page with that many requests and that size is going to finish loading lightning fast. That said, the Pingdom test shows a respectable load time of about 3 seconds, with the Flickr images taking the longest. (I did not test on my computer and I did not test any other pages than the home page.)

Based on what I have seen this early in the morning, not near peak internet time, I do not think you need a 2 CPU server (especially with the downgrade to mechanical HD). I do not think you need a gigabit pipe. What are your goals/what are you trying to accomplish? There is a lot you can do to try to optimize a server, and none of it will help when an external dependency like Flickr is taking the most time.

Keep an eye on your server loads later in the day when your visitor traffic is at its peak. If you start getting toward a load average of 8 (1 per core), then you may consider an upgrade to another CPU. With the load averages you presented, you look fine.

 

Thank you, that was so extremely helpful! I can get SSD with 2 processors, but that would put it out of my budget. I can also increase RAM with my current configuration - not sure if that would help.

Servint installed the Google PageSpeed module at my request, and I am interested specifically at this functionality (not yet enabled): https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-image-optimize

Would the 'Recompress Images' and 'Convert JPEG to Progressive' filters work on the Flickr images on my site or only on the images hosted on my server?

Thanks again, very much appreciated!

 

If the images loaded from Flickr and other external sources are the source of any elongated load-times, the only thing that would truly help is to pre-load images, and maybe also save them, either temporary and/or permanently on your server (basically proxy the images). That would probably involve quite a bit of coding, and may also be outside the budget.

 

So the Google module wouldn't affect them?

 

You do not give your RAM consumption. With 32 GB or RAM, I would imagine you have plenty to spare. But you will have to check. See this for info how to do it from the command line:

http://www.linux.com/community/blog...323-5-commands-to-check-memory-usage-on-linux

Based on the home page of the one site you provided, I do not think more RAM would help. But I have not examined secondary pages and do not know the load time of any of your forums. I suppose I could look at some secondary pages of the one site you provided later.

I think PageSpeed, as with just about everything Google does, is a pile of crap.

I have no idea about that PageSpeed stuff but I would doubt it would help you much as you have plenty of bandwidth capacity.

 

Thank you again. You've been a great help!

 

What you need is optimization and not a New server, the one you have is more the enought for your needs:

Your gtmatrix speeds are really bad, alot can be improved with adding :

1: Add Expires headers
2: Reduce DNS lookups (flicker is the bad boy here)
3: Defer parsing of JavaScript
4: Leverage browser caching


Also add APC and Opcache extenstions to your web server and your site will fly
Your current server is actualy overkill for your site, if you only try to work on the backend.

 

Thank you, I've been trying to do some of those things but having a hard time doing it. But I will keep at it. In the meanwhile I'm actually upgrading my server but only because it's the cheapest way to get more storage space, which I need.

I'm using Xcache - do I still use APC and Opcache with that? Also, if Flickr image loading takes so much time and there is nothing I can do about that, how can my site fly?

 

You generally use only one cache at a time. If Flickr loading is taking a long time (and it is), there is nothing you can do about it. Your main page HTML comes reasonably fast. Your forum is pretty fast (loads in 2 - 3 seconds for me). Could you make it faster? Possibly. Do you need to? No. Your home page is ~10 MB in size with everything included. My internet connection downloads at the rate of about 1 MB or 1.2 MB per second. No matter what you do, I am never going to be able to download all of your home page's content faster than 9 - 10 seconds.

If you want to waste money and time optimizing something for minimal benefit, you can do that. If you spend hours optimizing your server, maybe you might save me 200 ms of download time (1/5th of a second). Is it worth it? Would I notice that 1/5th of a second when it is still going to take me 9 seconds to download those images?

Those images on Flickr, are they yours? Is there a reason you are not hosting them on your server? Just wondering.

 

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. The images on Flickr belong to my site's members. I can offer the members space on the server to host images there, but most of them will continue to use Flickr. If the rate limiting step is the readers' internet connection speed and the image size, I guess it doesn't matter if I host the image or Flickr does other than the fact that I could compress the images.

I guess my main frustration with the site speed, other than it being a ranking factor and Google telling me it's bad, is that when I click on a new forum discussion, it takes a couple seconds to switch pages. I'd prefer that it switch pages immediately and then take a couple seconds to load the images rather than a couple seconds passing where nothing seems to happen after I click and then the images are there quickly (on my 50 Mbps connection)

 

Use myracloud.com/ and thank me later.

 

This is much much more powerfull then Your current server and cost less with 1gbit NIC Connection. 100 terrabit bandwidth

Dual Intel® Xeon®
E5-2620 Hexa-Core incl.
Hyper-Threading Technology

• RAM 128 GB DDR3 ECC RAM
  optional max. 384 GB
  (at additional cost)
• Hard Drives (max. 8) optional (at additional cost)
• RAID Controller Dell PERC H710
  8 Port SAS/SATA 6Gbit/s
• Remote Access iDRAC 7 Enterprise
• NIC 1 Gbit connected
• PSU Redundant
  Platinum Certified
  Hot Plug
• Backup Space 100 GB
• Inclusive Traffic 100 TB*

http://www.hetzner.de/ot/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290

 

I think you are expecting too much, more than you should expect. vBulletin from what I have understand is a pretty bloated script. I am getting forum page loads from click to render in 2 - 3 seconds, which is pretty good and also includes the ads. The home page loads in 3 - 4 seconds.

If you want to optimize your server, you can waste time doing that. Use PHP 5.5 or up, use Opcache. Disable directory-based configuration files (AllowOverride if you are using Apache, htaccess files are very inefficient). Then if you want to go further you could use an Ubuntu OS with an PHP-FPM setup. And maybe you will shave a half second off load time. Is it worth it?

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dxJrJC/http://www.mu-43.com/forum.php

 

No, not worth it to shave half a second. I see some vBulletin sites that are almost instant page loads, definitely under a second, but they don't have ads, many members, etc.

 

If you have links to examples, I would like to see them. If the page load is almost instantaneous, I would guess a page caching plugin or something is being used. It takes time to process thousands of lines of PHP code and run DB queries. Your forum's load speed is just fine. I have viewed several pages now. If it were my forum, I would be satisfied.

 

I will try to find the board I was thinking of. Someone was complaining about their forum speed with vBulletin 5, and someone else gave tips and linked to a really fast vBulletin 5 forum.

 

Okay, I found the one I was thinking of:

Complaint: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=296627

Example of fast vB5 forum: http://www.diecastmodelaircraft.com/

If my pages would load as fast as that forum, I'd be very psyched.

 

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/c3Yypm/http://www.diecastmodelaircraft.com/

The "wait time" for that page's HTML is only 59 ms. I don't see how that could be generated in that short of a time unless it is cached. You could always send the webmaster an email and ask.