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Speed Up Your Forums! vBulletin 4!
by ChopSuey 27 Feb 2010
Rating: (1 vote - 4.00 average)
Hopefully this article will help your slow vBulletin 4 forum speed up a bit.

1. First of all, here are some admincp settings you can set, credit to http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/member.php?245-eva2000
For vB 4.x try to DISABLE = set to NO these options

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Use Quick Navigation Menu

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Thread/Forum Read Marking Type - Database automatic forum marking is very processor intensive compared to Inactivity/Cookie based or Database no automatic forum marking, so if your mysql process is constantly pegged at 100+ % cpu usage, you don't want to be using automatic forum marking Database type.

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Forums Home Page Options -> Display Logged in Users?

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Forum Home Page Options -> Display Today's Birthdays?

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Forum Home Page Options -> Display Calendar Events?

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Forum Display Options (forumdisplay) -> Show Users Browsing Forums

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options -> Show Users Browsing Thread

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options -> Check Thread Rating

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options -> Check Thread Subscription (disable to check if it's load related if not re-enable it)

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options -> Full Next / Prev Links

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Searching Options -> Automatic Similar Thread search

Try to ENABLE = set to YES these options

AdminCP -> vBulletin Options > Cookies and HTTP Header options -. Enable GZip HTML Output - Set to 1 for optimum results.

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Searching Options -> Queue Search Updates

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Searching Options -> Search Result Sharing
2. Store CSS As files - more info http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/stylemanager_css_as_file

A complex CSS stylesheet can occupy quite a block of text when printed out in full. This entire block of CSS code must be included with every page viewed by your visitors, and with a lot of visitors over a long period of time this can mount up.

One of the beauties of CSS is that the stylesheet can be held in a separate file from the HTML content, allowing web browsers to store the CSS in their cache, negating the need to reload the stylesheet with every page viewed.

vBulletin allows you to have your stylesheets automatically saved to files by the system, resulting in lower bandwidth usage and faster-loading pages for your visitors.

To enable vBulletin to save your stylesheets as files, you must first ensure that your web server has permission to write and delete files within the clientscript/vbulletin_css directory.

You should then go to vBulletin Options > Style & Language Settings and switch the Store CSS Stylesheets as Files? setting to Yes.
After pressing the [Save], your stylesheets will be converted to files and saved into the clientscript/vbulletin_css directory.

Whenever you make a change to your styles that alters the CSS, the stored files will automatically be updated.
3. Enabling http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/datastore

To improve performance, vBulletin caches certain information which isn't updated often in the datastore, so that it doesn't have to be rebuilt every time it's needed.

Examples for this are

* forumcache - A serialized array with all the forums along with their options and permissions
* options - A serialized array with all the information set in the vBulletin Options
* profilefield - A serialized array of all the profile fields and their options.

The datastore data is stored in the datastore database table by default, but certain settings in the config.php file allow this to be saved in other places, to improve performance:
PHP Code:
 // ****** DATASTORE CACHE CONFIGURATION *****
 // Here you can configure different methods for caching datastore items.    
 // vB_Datastore_Filecache  - for using a cache file
 // $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Filecache';    
 // vB_Datastore_Memcached - for using a Memcache server    
 // It is also necessary to specify the hostname or IP address and the port the server is listening on
 // $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Memcached';
 // $config['Misc']['memcacheserver'] = '127.0.0.1';
 // $config['Misc']['memcacheport'] = '11211'; 
vB_Datastore_Filecache
This option saves the datastore data in the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file. Reading from the filesystem is generally less load-intensive than querying the database.

To use this option, you'll need to make sure that the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file is writable and readable by PHP. Usually this is chmod 777. Then, uncomment the following line in the config.php file.

(If your on a VPS or Dedi install http://xcache.lighttpd.net/ its faster than others. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php?t=213267 - http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/InstallFromSource

4. Get rid of those rounded corners! Credit to Andy, original post here

Spoiler (click to open)


Quote by 10 Gauge
I own my own dual core colocated box that our forum is hosted on and I have checked system resources and load averages and all are very low. vb3 used to run LIGHTNING fast, ever since upgrading to vb4 page load times are absolutely horrible, everything feels so sluggish.

Is there a way to speed her up??? I have installed the Optimization hook and run it and it didn't seem to do diddly.

Any other suggestions?
One reason vB4 is slower than vb3 is the use of shading and rounded corners. Add this to the bottom of the additional.css template and your forum will speed up considerably.

* { -moz-box-shadow: none !important; }
* { -webkit-box-shadow: none !important; }

* { -moz-border-radius: 0px !important; }
* { -webkit-border-radius: 0px !important; }

Close
.
One reason vB4 is slower than vb3 is the use of shading and rounded corners. Add this to the bottom of the additional.css template and your forum will speed up considerably.
PHP Code:
* { -moz-box-shadow: none !important; }
* { -webkit-box-shadow: none !important; }

* { -moz-border-radius: 0px !important; }
* { -webkit-border-radius: 0px !important; } 
Feedback from users, saying their forum loads faster.

5. Install vB4 Supercharged download it here. It does NOT work on 4.0.2 PL1 just yet, we have to wait until the author has updated the modification.

6. http://davidmchenry.info/2009/12/18/vbulletin-4-optimized-htaccess/ - add those contents to your htaccess.

7. Add to top of headinclude
HTML Code:
<META http-equiv=Page-Exit content=BlendTrans(Duration=0)>
<META http-equiv=Page-Enter content=BlendTrans(Duration=0)>
8. Download YSLow - add the contents to your htaccess.

9. You can Improve Page Loading Time

10. Enable Remote YUI:
YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) script files are hosted locally on your server, you may however have them served from Yahoo or Google servers, saving you some bandwidth and potentially decreasing load times.
AdminCP > Settings > Server Settings And Optimization Options > Remote YUI to YES - Prefer Google.

11. In addition to this, check out articles from one of the worlds largest webmaser forums.

http://articles.digitalpoint.com/content.php?r=7-Optimize-vBulletin-4

If you are using Memcached servers:

http://articles.digitalpoint.com/content.php?r=14-Monitor-Memcached-Servers-With-vBulletin

Thats it! If your forums have sped up a bit please let me know, if they have not and your using a VPS or Dedicated server, request for a server optimization.

FractalizeR: VBulletin 4 extensive optimization guide (Part I)
FractalizeR: VBulletin 4 extensive optimization guide (Part II)
More optimization

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