I have a site with Threads: 136,513, Posts: 2,506,067, Members: 28,577 over 3000 members are on at the same time making the site extremely active constantly, I need to know what I need to run such a forum, down to an exact specification, recently the forum has been going down a lot as it is being used more and more frequently by members.

It uses vBulletin software for the forums which don't use any enhancements just basically the forums scaled down, can anyone give me any recommendations for the best performance of the forums server wise.

Shoot a PM to Martyn Dale. He's had a fair amount of experience with forums.

Step 1: Set up the new web server and the account/site.
Step 2: Backup your vBulletin's files and directories to your local machine (or use wget from the new machine instead, if you want.)
Step 3: Upload the backed up files and directories of the vBulletin to the account on your new server.
Step 4: Close the original forum - In vBulletin, just use the option that displays a "Forum Temporarilly Closed" message.
Step 5: Make a copy of your database to your local machine - Use phpmyadmin's "export" function and "Save File As."
Step 6: Import the SQL code to a new database on your new server.
Step 7: Make sure the site works on your new server without errors. vBulletin will let you browse the forum even though it's closed, if you're logged in as an admin.
Step 8: Open the forum on the new server up (opposite of Step 4.)
Step 9: Change your domain's name servers to your new server.

RED items are in regards to OLD server
Green items are in regards to NEW server

Bam, foolproof migration!

If you can't do this yourself, I'd recommend you contact Total Server Solutions.

Sorry I know how to migrate servers, I'm looking for what servers, specs I would need to make sure the forum doesn't go down constantly.

Steps to take to make sure peak performance etc.

We run a bigger vBulletin forum on a single server, the biggest thing we found to be effecting performance was the 'new posts' link on the forum. It basically performs a search. After a lot of testing we traced our servers problems to the searching system in vBulletin being worse than awful for efficiency.

A bit of research later, and I came across 'Sphinx'. Following the guide I linked to from my Blog, I was able to set up sphinx, which has worked flawlessly since.

http://tim.igoe.me.uk/view/31-Improved-Sea...vBulletin.html/

Hope that one helps you a bit.

On what kind of server are you running your board now?
If you are gonna run db and http on same server i would go with dual cpu quad core something with high clock around 2.5ghz and 4 or 8gb of ram with SAS disks of course.
But I can tell for sure when i see what you are running now, because i recently purchased X3320 with 4 gb of ram and its quite improvement over my current box xeon 3060 with 4 gb of ram.

Sphinx is of course must have on such a large board, and i have noticed quite improvement while using xcache and vbulletin.

Moved from using eAccelerator to xCache and have noticed a marked improvement on performance already.

Running a forum with 350000 users and 7 million posts on a single server, Dual Xeon 5130 (2GHz) with 4GB ram and dual scsi's (db files on one, everything else on the other).

I've got a similar question in relation to this. My forum content is huge and mainly resides in the attachments/. However it's so big that I can't even FTP to my local machine as it times-out.

What's the best way of getting at the content, I've used Leech FTP and Dreamweaver with no luck?

Could you ssh into your server and tar/zip up the folder that all the attachments are stored in to give you one smaller file to download?

or assuming you have shell access, you could use sftp/scp.

I was thinking of SSH (not sure of the correct commands to use also), but since I've got 13gb of image attachments I'm not sure how much they can compress to?

Thanks

tar -czf images.tgz /path/to/forum/attachments/images

for example would tar (and zip) the images folder.

To extract it, tar -xzf images.tgz

Thanks for this, very helpful. So to extract it to another forum I could use?:
tar -xzf images.tgz /path/to/forum2/attachments/images

Also, how to delete the tar file after extracting?

Or download the tar file to my Z: drive, then re-upload on a new server? I guess tar'ring an image folder won't result in alot of compression?

Thanks again

ye[, exactly.


rm /path/to/images.tgz

That'd work fine as well, taring itself doesn't add any compression, but the 'z' flag enables gzip compression (hence the tgz extension, rather than just a tar. Alternatively you could use the flag j, which is bzip2 compression (.tbz)

Thanks Tim!