As discussed in our website performance section, loading time of the website page is one of the vital part deciding the stay/revisit of the users and every website should open in the reasonable time. One of our client contacted us to improve the performance of their vbulletin forum with ~225K users and counting. We had already improved the performance of their socialengine website but the number of users for the forum were much more than the social community. This was a challenging task for us and we accept the challenge to improve the performance of vbulletin forum.
We used the apache benchmark to find out the maximum number of the concurrent users vbulletin can take and found that it can only take maximum of 50 users. With the current user load, it was not possible to open the page of the vbulletin in the non-peak time. They were also using the Gossamer along with the vbulletin as well so that add the complexity in speed up vbulletin forum performance.
Methodology Followed for vbulletin performance
- We configured the webserver by fine-tuning the webserver configuration and replacing the php processing with optimized module with the combination of fastcgi+php-fpm.
- We replaced the MySQL default engine with the more efficient database settings that performs much better with lots of concurrent users. We have configured the database to get the best performance of Mysql.
- We evaluated various caching solutions like APC/Xcache and memcached and found combination of APC/memcahed to be the best for the bestrecipe. Xcache could be an alternative caching solution in case we decided to replace APC.
- The tool used for the analysis was Apache Benchmark. We created sample users on the development site and configured the tools to run the users. Hence, when the tests execute in several threads, it simulates the effect of several concurrent users. During the tests, we measured the throughput and response time. To obtain the peak number of users for a particular scenario, the number of concurrent users was set to 425 though with the initial configuration site was not able to take up load more than 50 concurrent users.
After the performance optimization,the response time improved drastically and improved more than ~800 %.The number of concurrent users support by site has also increased to almost ~900% so website can handle more than 9 times concurrent users.
We also provide performance optimization services for website so feel free to contact us in case your vbulletin is not fast enough to open quickly.
