Part 3: Tuning a 1&1 VPS to improve a vBulletin board.
The tuning step taken to improve the performance of our vBulletin site hosted at 1&1 on a VPS was tuning. I simply adjusted the following cache and buffer sizes to match the list below.
- key_buffer=64M
- table_cache=256
- sort_buffer=4M
- read_buffer_size=1M
This is up from an 8M Key_buffer, 128 table_cache, 2M sort_buffer, and 512k read_buffer_size. The command issued to make these changes looks similar to this.
mysqld_safe -O key_buffer=64M -O table_cache=256 -O sort_buffer=4M -O read_buffer_size=1M -u admin -p &
I don’t have any concrete benchmarks saved that show the performance gained by making this change, however using the page load timer in YSlow I have noticed that the time it takes for the “New Posts” search button to render page 1 has dropped from a rough average of 3.5 seconds down to an average of 2.5 seconds. Any page that doesn’t have a lot of images hosted off site feels much faster now while browsing around.
If you have any questions about the tuning I’ve done please feel free to comment. I will be sure to respond. If you would like help tuning your vBulletin board I might be available to help with that as well. The tuning techniques I’ve outlined in these three posts don’t just affect vBulletin users. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and any other PHP, and MySQL based site will benefit from them.
With three fairly easy tuning techniques our vBulletin site is dramatically faster. Next steps if deemed necessary will include adjusting table indexes in MySQL, and adjusting queries in vBulletin itself to make use of the indexes. Be sure to check back for updates.
Thanks to: rmcgervey for the image
