Xenforo site really slow

[Cromulent]

I run a VPS with 2GBs of RAM and SSD hard drives with more than enough space for all my sites. I have several wordpress sites, a mediawiki site and a phpBB site installed on the same box as my Xenforo site. Every site is lightning fast with the exception of the Xenforo site. I have no idea what is causing it. I am not using any swap space and as I said every other site works perfectly.

Is there anything I can do to make the Xenforo site faster? I've just renewed my license and installed the latest version of Xenforo along with the latest version of my forum theme. The site is so slow that it sometimes times out when trying to connect to it which I find really weird. It makes doing anything in the admin panel painful such as upgrading Xenforo or adding forums or categories.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Cromulent]

OK. So I enabled the PHP opcache in PHP 7 and that seems to have sped things up quite a lot. It now seems to be a lot faster especially in the admin panel. I also dropped the PHP memory requirement from 256MBs down to 128MBs and that seemed to help as well.

Any other tips for how to make my server run better would be gratefully accepted.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Any other tips for how to make my server run better would be gratefully accepted.

There are lots of tips to make a server run better, but adjustments need to be made based on what your server is doing.

The problem with what you're asking, is adjusting something in PHP for XF only could affect your other installs which are all running well. Even activating opcache, by default it places all files into the same cache, no segregation, and doing so can cause conflicts with cached PHP files. Activating segregation provides safety, yet has a negative on opcache performance.

You're asking for a haystack, to find a needle problem.

 

[Cromulent]

There are lots of tips to make a server run better, but adjustments need to be made based on what your server is doing.

The problem with what you're asking, is adjusting something in PHP for XF only could affect your other installs which are all running well. Even activating opcache, by default it places all files into the same cache, no segregation, and doing so can cause conflicts with cached PHP files. Activating segregation provides safety, yet has a negative on opcache performance.

You're asking for a haystack, to find a needle problem.

Ah, OK. Thanks for the reply. It is just I have no idea how to go about debugging this problem.

I might just disable the opcache based on what you have said. I don't want any problems like the ones you have described. I'll have to do some digging. I just would have thought server optimisation would have been something that there would have been a blog post on somewhere that I could read and figure out what the problem was.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I just would have thought server optimisation would have been something that there would have been a blog post on somewhere that I could read and figure out what the problem was.

Server optimisation is an individual, per server, basis. There is no single one size fits all solution.

If opcache is helping, and not hindering, your other sites, then leave it. Just remember that if issues arise somewhere, you may need to enable segregation in your opcache.ini file.

The best advice I can give you is this: open your php.ini and php-fpm.conf, your php-fpm *.conf files per host, php.d *.ini, so forth, and research each and every single setting to understand what each means.

Yes -- that will take you a whole bunch of time, months likely. The idea is that with each setting you will learn what it does, whether you want to test it, or not, and if you do enable or adjust the setting, you are only adjusting one setting at any given time to watch and measure for problems.

Start a spreadsheet and record every single action you change and date - whether it was positive or negative.

 

[Cromulent]

Server optimisation is an individual, per server, basis. There is no single one size fits all solution.

If opcache is helping, and not hindering, your other sites, then leave it. Just remember that if issues arise somewhere, you may need to enable segregation in your opcache.ini file.

The best advice I can give you is this: open your php.ini and php-fpm.conf, your php-fpm *.conf files per host, php.d *.ini, so forth, and research each and every single setting to understand what each means.

Yes -- that will take you a whole bunch of time, months likely. The idea is that with each setting you will learn what it does, whether you want to test it, or not, and if you do enable or adjust the setting, you are only adjusting one setting at any given time to watch and measure for problems.

Start a spreadsheet and record every single action you change and date - whether it was positive or negative.

Thanks. I actually went in and disabled the opcache completely for all my PHP sites and lo and behold my Xenforo site now loads fine where as in the past there were significant issues with loading threads. At first I thought it was an issue with loading external resources such as signature images but it seems like it was the PHP 7 opcache that was causing issues. It also didn't make my other sites slower so I'll leave it like it is for the time being.

Now I just need to read the Xenforo manual again because the admin panel isn't as easy to navigate as the other forum systems I am used to. I might even look into installing some extensions as well.

 

[m1ne]

I'd definitely recommend Redis. There's an addon here for it.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

What PHP version do you use? And is it fastcgi?

 

[Cromulent]

What PHP version do you use? And is it fastcgi?

Not sure of the exact version but it is PHP 7.0 and no it is not FastCGI it is Apache mod_php.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Are you using cpanel? If so, activate PHP-FPM for each site accordingly via your WHM interface.

 

[Cromulent]

Are you using cpanel? If so, activate PHP-FPM for each site accordingly via your WHM interface.

Nope. Command line only I'm afraid. I guess I could learn how to swtch to PHP-FPM manually though. I used to use it in the past when I was running Nginx as my web server but I switched back to Apache for ease of use reasons.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

OMG... never heard of anyone switching back. NGINX is just massive for performance. Regardless... PHP-FPM would give you an enormous performance boost for your sites, reducing server load to boot, regardless whether NGINX or Apache.

 

[Cromulent]

OMG... never heard of anyone switching back. NGINX is just massive for performance. Regardless... PHP-FPM would give you an enormous performance boost for your sites, reducing server load to boot, regardless whether NGINX or Apache.

Nginx is a PITA when it comes to software that only supports Apache .htaccess and I didn't have the time to learn how to replicate .htaccess features in Nginx.

But I'll certainly look into PHP-FPM. Thanks for the tip.

 

[WSWD]

Something is very wrong here. Xenforo should be very fast right out of the box, without NGINX or anything else. It has been on every single setup I've ever done. There almost has to be something else at play here.