Question A question for LARGE forum owners using vBShout!

[Diana Notacat]

I apologize if this isn't the best place to ask the question, but I was hoping to find some feedback and advice from other forum owners! : D


I love my vbshout but I can't seem to use it because my site is TOO active. Everytime I break 8-10 active users in the shoutbox, my server starts to lag and then it crashes until I get in there and turn it off. (I have about 40 people signed on the forums at a time during peak hours) I've been tweaking the settings in every way I can to try and take the load off. But 8-10 users posting shouts at the same time and then KABOOM. I have this same issue with other shoutboxes over the years, so I don't think it's the vbshout itself.


MY QUESTION: Are the any LARGE forums with a high amount of users successfully using the shoutbox out there that can give me some advice? Are you doing something special with it. And what are the specs on your server that makes it badass enough to handle the load? I do have a private server, so I'm wondering if I have to shell out extra cash for upgrading. D: I'm not sure -what- would have to be upgraded.

 

[Fillip H.]

Our server is a dual 5518 Xeon with 12GB RAM, it seems to handle it just fine even on our active hosted sites, though one of them has an issue somewhere (not necessarily vBShout, just somewhere) that we've thus far been unable to track down.

There's unfortunately no set upgrade advice I'm able to give you

 

[Jem]

You board seems very similar to my own. I have about 20-40 users on at any given time, but jump to around 100 during peak hours. Average Posts: 111.22/Day, 778.56/Week, 3336.7/Month.

Server info:
CPU GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz
Version Parallels Plesk Panel v10.3.1_build1013110726.09 os_CentOS 5
OS Linux 2.6.18-238.19.1.el5xen
RAM 1 Gig dedicated

I was having some issues with crashes, and slowness especially during peak times (20-30 chatters). I have discovered that setting up a CRON job to do a graceful apache restart once an hour greatly improves the amount of free memory I gain as it kills off any unused processes that for whatever reason did not terminate properly on their own. For my OS it's a simple apachectl -k graceful command. This also delt with the "invalid response from server" issues I had from time to time.

Also, limit the chat to just one page of your forum. I had it display on every page in the beginning, and it was a bad idea. While it's nice to have it there, many users open up several instances of the site at once. They generally look at the what's new and open each new topic in it's own tab. This causes the shoutbox to load multiple times and it will in most likely hood not be needed.

Finally, you can improve the overall efficiency of your site by using a wonderful product called vBOptimize