RAM usage compared to vBulletin

[Shane1]

I have a good sized vBulletin board (1.4 million posts and 1.4 gigs database). There is not a terribly heavy amount of activity. Most of the posts are either old or come from a small but active group of members who post a lot. Server load is quite reasonable, usually close to 0 (currently 0.10). The problem is it's RAM hungry, easily chewing through the 32GB I had on my last server. This could be in part because of my MySQL settings, which more or less are set as recommended by vBulletin support, and/or because of some of the hacks I have installed. Anyway, I'm curious as to how Xenforo may compare.

 

[Dakis]

One of my sites (http://www.avsite.gr) is around the same size (1.5million posts) and I saw considerable improvement in both server load and ram usage after the move to xenForo.

Having said that though, some add-ons in the forum world do have the habit of skyrocketing the load and/or memory usage. I definitely remember a couple of those in vbulletin I used to have.

 

[Adam Howard]

I have a good sized vBulletin board (1.4 million posts and 1.4 gigs database). There is not a terribly heavy amount of activity. Most of the posts are either old or come from a small but active group of members who post a lot. Server load is quite reasonable, usually close to 0 (currently 0.10). The problem is it's RAM hungry, easily chewing through the 32GB I had on my last server. This could be in part because of my MySQL settings, which more or less are set as recommended by vBulletin support, and/or because of some of the hacks I have installed. Anyway, I'm curious as to how Xenforo may compare.

XenForo alone uses virtually no resources.

Though keep it in mind that a bad add-on on any development can cause issues.

With that said, even with 70 add-ons, 10 styles, and several hundred people online at once, my copy of XenForo sits at about 125 mb (if you believe the cPanel stats). Which is much less / fewer than my original IP. Board or vBulletin ever used.

I believe both you and your hosting provider will find XenForo very agreeable in the regards to resource usage.

 

[Slavik]

I have a good sized vBulletin board (1.4 million posts and 1.4 gigs database). There is not a terribly heavy amount of activity. Most of the posts are either old or come from a small but active group of members who post a lot. Server load is quite reasonable, usually close to 0 (currently 0.10). The problem is it's RAM hungry, easily chewing through the 32GB I had on my last server. This could be in part because of my MySQL settings, which more or less are set as recommended by vBulletin support, and/or because of some of the hacks I have installed. Anyway, I'm curious as to how Xenforo may compare.

I doubt your using anywhere near that figure in reality. Linux likes to use free ram for everything if it can, so it gives the impression that it may be using 90% of your available ram, but in terms of "actually" being used, its probably much less.

 

[Jesepi]

^ what he said. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

 

[Shane1]

I never got to test maxing out my last server. It hit 100% and dipped into swap after I had made the decision to switch to a cheaper server that had more RAM, though during that period of a few days overall performance was still fine. The one before that was 24GB, and my forums slowed to a crawl, with pages taking 5 minutes to load for about a week. This had happened twice previously over the course of about a year, but the other two I was able to figure out a way to recover. Never had this problem until I switched from vb3 to 4.

 

[Adam Howard]

^ what he said. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

I have never agreed with this statement.

 

[craigiri]

Shane, I have a busy site (over 1000 online within 15 minutes) and a 1.5 million post forum on 8 G of RAM and a quad-core 2.6 mhz Xeon.

It does the job just fine - even including ElasticSearch.

32G of Ram should be enough for you or just about anyone!

 

[TPerry]

32G of Ram should be enough for you or just about anyone!

You can never have to much RAM!

 

[Sheratan]

Shane, I have a busy site (over 1000 online within 15 minutes) and a 1.5 million post forum on 8 G of RAM and a quad-core 2.6 mhz Xeon.

It does the job just fine - even including ElasticSearch.

32G of Ram should be enough for you or just about anyone!

32 GB of RAM is a RAM for a shared hosting server, served around 100-300 account?

So @Shane1 if you had a 32 GB of RAM and you had only 1 sites with that condition (x post z gb database) on that server and you are running out of memory, then something wrong happen at your vbulletin config, or server config, or both.

 

[WSWD]

So @Shane1 if you had a 32 GB of RAM and you had only 1 sites with that condition (x post z gb database) on that server and you are running out of memory, then something wrong happen at your vbulletin config, or server config, or both.

This! If your forum is really using all 32GB of RAM, there is something extremely wrong somewhere. No way should it ever be using that kind of RAM.

 

[Slavik]

I never got to test maxing out my last server. It hit 100% and dipped into swap after I had made the decision to switch to a cheaper server that had more RAM, though during that period of a few days overall performance was still fine. The one before that was 24GB, and my forums slowed to a crawl, with pages taking 5 minutes to load for about a week. This had happened twice previously over the course of about a year, but the other two I was able to figure out a way to recover. Never had this problem until I switched from vb3 to 4.

Drop me a PC with your server login details if you want, I can take a look for you.

 

[craigiri]

Shane, make sure you throttle the crawlers! Not to say that's the total cause, but I started blocking a lot of the useless robots and even turn google down during my busy season.