Ideas about heavy traffic periods on my forum

[Jeff Fuqua]

I run a football site and, on game days, a "game thread" gets created for reaction to the game as it's happening. Last Sunday, the game thread had 850 posts created over a three-hour period with the vast majority of all visitors (400+) hitting refresh to catch the lastest post.

When I was a vB forum, it would often bring the forum down to a crawl so I blocked guests from seeing the game thread. xF is better but I was wondering if there might be a way to keep spiders off the forum during certain times. I don't know how much it would help load but I'm looking for any way to speed things up.

Yes, I have a chat room. For whatever reason, it's not used but by a few despite my suggesting people discuss the game there.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[RobParker]

What addons do you have active?

We run a football forum too and the end of the transfer window was hectic to say the least (with 3000+ users online). We found that disabling xenporta helped a lot, as did disabling a few other addons.

 

[Jeff Fuqua]

Hmmm... I do use XenPorta and lots of others. I hadn't thought about shutting them down on game day. Downside is, we get a lot of visitors and their experience might not be as impressive as the site with all its bells and whistles. On the other hand, a speedier forum might be a good trade-off.

What would be great is having an add-on which would deactivate some add-ons and other things when the server load rises above a certain level.

I'd love to have a ban robots add-on just to see what impact that would have.

 

[Jeff Fuqua]

Here's a rundown of all I use:

 

[Jake Bunce]

That's a lot of addons. Some addons add queries and additional overhead to page loads which can affect performance. You should disable or uninstall any addons you don't use.

You can implement APC and memcache for increased performance, though this does require some server knowledge:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-plus-apc-plus-memcache.34985/#post-397405