I'm looking for advice on configuring a pretty active forum board

[Orit]

Hi
We have a pretty active board with many forums. Google Analytics says over 40k users a day visit our board.
Lately we have had serious performance issues.
Is there anyone else with an active board that can give me advice how to cache parts of the website to lower the load on the DB and speed up the site?

Thanks!

 

[chillibear]

Have you already had a play with any of the options outlined in the documentation?

Cache support | Manual | XenForo

End-user documentation for XenForo

xenforo.com

Although of course it does all somewhat depend on server specs I have one board with about 100k unique visitors daily which doesn't have any caching enabled (beyond the php Zend OPCache) and that runs quite happily (although I keep intending to get some caching in place). However I'd start playing with the options outlined in the documentation. You might also look at caching proxy layers like Cloudflare, there are lot of members here that seem to use that and can probably advise.

 

[Bob]

Try @Xon 's recommendation as posted here...

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/large-article-forum-being-extremely-slow.205704/#post-1573272

set global join_cache_level=0;

This has worked a treat for everyone that I know that has page loading speed issues on Content Listing Pages (Index, Forum, Category) with a large amount of content. Can't hurt to try it

 

[Xon]

I'ld recommend using MySQL's slow query logger or my Slow query logger add-on to find slow queries to figure out what is causing this.

The reason the add-on is marked as unmaintained is I can't provide (free) support for why it is detecting slow queries.

Alternatively you can enable debug mode for your IP via config.php and check a few pages to see if there is excessive query counts & times on various pages.

This is actually the best way to discover what is commonly called the "N + 1 Select Problem" problem, as each query has a tiny amount of overhead and when you've got dozens to hundreds on a page it adds up. While no single query is slow, it can add massive amounts of pressure on the database so all the queries end up being slower than you expect.

This has worked a treat for everyone that I know that has page loading speed issues on Content Listing Pages (Index, Forum, Category) with a large amount of content. Can't hurt to try it

It is one of those changes which works remarkably well.

 

[GrnEyedDvl]

I agree with Xon and I will add that its a bit hard to give any config advice when we have no idea what you are configuring and what you have access to. Shared or dedicated hosting? Op system? Apache? nginx?

Also how are your forum permissions set up? Specifically if you have a ton of user groups and are not using inheritance the way it was designed to be used it can cause an issue because your permissions set looks like a plate of spaghetti.