Move to xf from vB with 12 million of posts

[dbembibre]

I think that is time to move to xf because im tired of be stuck in 3.8 series.

My principal doubt are related to performance, so far i have a forum with 12 million of posts, 2.000-3.000 concurrent users in peak times and the load of my front servers are always around 0.90 - 1.50.

My forums are installed in two dedicated servers, one for DB with MySQL 5.5 (MyISAM engine) and a front server for web, with Apache 2.2, php and xCache (i can swith to memcached without problems if is required). Both servers are a bit old, dual dual xeon (intel E-5130) with 8GB of ram each. Dual scsci 15.000RPM. I know that today exist better servers but i dont want to change hardware. Only want to know if is possible run my forums over xforum with my servers specs.

I have vBSEO installed and 1 million of url indexed by google, one of my preocupations is that i see that to match with the final URL structure apache need to do a extra conversion from the url structure of xf with a apache rewrite rule to match with the vbseo url structure. Maybe this can be spike the front server load.

I serve all my static content via CDN, and searchs are powered by sphinx.

Any suggestions to achieve this ?

 

[Teapot]

Although I am nowhere near a big board owner (175,000 posts), I've read plenty about how similar setups have achieved far better performance with XenForo than with vBulletin with no other changes. I'll go through a few things that I know the answer to and leave the heavy big-board stuff to someone more qualified:

MySQL 5.5 (MyISAM engine)

Works fine with XenForo, although you will see greatly increased performance if you allow XenForo to use InnoDB tables where appropriate - this will be automatically done when you install XenForo if your MySQL server configuration allows InnoDB.

xCache (i can swith to memcached without problems if is required)

XCache is fully supported by XenForo - just add this to your config.php:

$config['cache']['enabled'] = true;
$config['cache']['frontend'] = 'Core';
$config['cache']['frontendOptions']['cache_id_prefix'] = 'xf_';
$config['cache']['backend'] = 'Xcache';

Your hardware specs should be perfectly acceptable for XF if they're already running vBulletin without problem; as mentioned, XenForo objectively uses hardware more efficiently than vBulletin does - see this thread or this one at DigitalPoint about their switchover stories and data, which speaks better than I ever could.

As for the rewrites: as far as I know, they shouldn't be a problem for performance, but I'll let someone more experienced answer that with more accuracy

 

[Slavik]

XenForo should run fine on your current servers. If you wanted to eeek out even more from them, you could install Percona server for better database performance.

Rewrites should be handled fine using the file-based redirection scripts (I think), as these look up according to thread ID. Failing that, Jake Bunce would be able to assist providing you the relevent rewrites.

CDN support is simple in XenForo when using pull-based CDN's. Push based would just require you to specify the /data directory and configure it as such.

XenForo uses an addon called Enhanced Search, based on the ElasticSearch engine. http://www.elasticsearch.org/ which offers amazing performance with an easy setup.

 

[Claudio]

APC is also fully soported by XenForo

 

[Jake Bunce]

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/server-load-vb-xf-joomla-proof-is-everything.8073/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-caching-amazing.32629/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/defining-a-cache-whats-the-point.35753/#post-406629

So basically setup APC, memcache, and ElasticSearch and you be jammin.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I would also note that XenForo 1.2 corrects a few scalability problems with some features in XenForo such as user crons and email notifications. Overall XenForo is very scalable and powers several extremely large forums, but as the owner of an extremely large forum you will be interested in the improvements in 1.2. A pre-release version of 1.2 is expected in June.

 

[dbembibre]

Thanks to all for the reply's. I adquire a xf license many time ago, in first version of xf if i dont remember bad, i try to do a little import of my current database and test in a separate server, if everything looks ok, start with the real migation.
One more time thanks a lot.