Need help with excessive refreshing by users

[kingston]

There are certain critical points in the year where I will have one to two thousand concurrent users online literally clicking refresh every 3 seconds to get information.

The board slows to a 20-30 second crawl at that point. What do I do? I have a powerful server, 4 gig of ram, great bandwidth. Besides moving to a multiserver setup (one for MySQL and one for XF) what can I do?

 

[Jake Bunce]

There are certain critical points in the year where I will have one to two thousand concurrent users online literally clicking refresh every 3 seconds to get information.

What kind of information is it? Could it be posted to a static page? I have seen macrumors.com replace their front page with a static page for updates during big events like the Macworld keynote.

 

[kingston]

What kind of information is it? Could it be posted to a static page? I have seen macrumors.com replace their front page with a static page for updates during big events like the Macworld keynote.

It is updates to a competition. Usually the way the updates get passed is someone tweets them and then someone posts OR someone gets a text and then someone posts.

I thought about replacing the banner at the top with a tweet list widget just for competitions.

Also, how do I find out what is the bottleneck when that happens? I literally try and batten down the hatches when a comp comes... and it doesn't work.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Well you can improve overall performance by implementing caching. Here is a guide for using APC:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/tip-use-apc.6456/

 

[Kier]

Provide a 'Refresh' link that reloads the current page - it's WAY less intensive than an actual refresh, as none of the JS, CSS, images etc. will be re-requested.

You can do it with Javascript:

<a href="javascript:window.location=window.location">Reload Page</a>

 

[Kier]

Provide a 'Refresh' link that reloads the current page - it's WAY less intensive than an actual refresh, as none of the JS, CSS, images etc. will be re-requested.

For what it's worth, such a link is already provided on XenForo thread pages - on the first page of the thread, just click the date in the thread description under the title, and for subsequent pages just click the page number of the current page.