Are performance options built into XF 2?

[HJW]

Looking to change to XF and trying the demo.

Can't see many performance options other than disabling search. It it built into the default forum to do things like serving a cached page to visitors?

My forum gets 250 concurrent users and 50 logged in at peak times, hoping to use a digital ocean $15 a month 2gb Ram 2 vCpv to run the forum. But not sure if this will be enough.

 

[sbj]

Those specs are more than enough for your numbers I would say.

And XF lets you to use chaching:
https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/manual/cache/

I can't comment on how exactly and in which parts it works, but modern techniques are used as far as I know such as minify JS and other performance techniques. I mean having a cache mechanism probably means it caches various of things, but I don't know the specifics.

And XF is very fast and has good performance natively.

 

[Alpha1]

You can use Enhanced Search to greatly reduce strain. Using DO will allow you to separate it from the rest of your site so that search will not affect search performance. You can also opt to separate web and database in separate droplets.
If you use @xfrocks attachment store addon then you can also serve attachments from digital ocean spaces which is much cheaper in bandwidth.

There are various free and paid performance addons. However, XF2 is fairly new so some of them are not released yet. Take a look at @Xon 's addons in this regard.

 

[dknife]

I use a DO standard 4Gb droplet for my site, which includes the forum and other site components and a lot of images and have similar if slightly less concurrent users. I also utilize DO's block storage for my attachments and data, which in effect is a separate server source. Performance is fantastic, even with images sourced from the block storage. I was on the 2Gb 2CPU droplet until they changed their pricing recently and moved up free of charge instead of staying at current for less $.

I'm also using Litespeed as my web server though, which is a very high performance web server optimized for PHP and using standard features like gzip and HTTP/2 to optimize delivery. I do not do any caching specifically. Litespeed is a commercial product however, and requires licensing. Used it for years for work and personal site and love it.

Even with just a modern apache installation (fpm?) you'll be fine on the 2Gb 2vCPU droplet.