Thread

Checking to see if any of you folks are using the EE Forums on a busy site…..obviously we have to determine what is busy! IMHO, this depends more on how much the users are posting, reading various threads, etc…..than just how many people are online.

Right now, our forum has 500+ users online, of which 100+ are registered. Knowing my users and the number of forums, each reader reads vastly more threads than, for instance, this forum.

Based on Google Analytics, we have about 42,000 separate page loads in a day on the discussion forum. EE is doing more than just our forum, but this is the lions share…...

I have a dedicated Gentoo server - Dell mid-range dual core fairly new. Server load is starting to rise, but below 3 the vast majority of the time.

So, to those other EE users here - do any of your sites get this much traffic or more? On the forum (which seems to use more php/mysql queries)?

Just trying to get some relativity as to what others are experiencing in terms of forums and server load.

thanks

Hi, welcome to the ExpressionEngine forums.  They run pretty well right here, no? =)

Yeah, Lisa, but I don’t know your server setup or what type of page views you get. I know when I (and assume others too) come here, we don’t read hundreds of threads….and I get some users pounding and pounding…in fact, most of my users are addicts (in terms of traffic).

Do you know how many page loads your forum section here gets daily? I’d like to compare notes with other forum users…..also, I have scripts loading up banners also, which adds to the load….

I don’t have those stats; but I can assure you that we have many, many users that constantly shift refresh the forums.

Not that I have any such names… but the point is, that the forums themselves will not be your obstacle; it is much more likely to be your hardware environment and server tuning.  If you’re pulling in ads, then that can be a huge blocking point.  There are some forums I load (not EE forums, they’re about dogs and about reef aquariums) that usually load fast, but often just spin - and if you look at the status bar, it’s an adserver hold up.  Frustrating.

I understand - it would be nice for me to talk to other heavy users so we can determine when we do run up against the wall….not that I have nearly done so yet, but at the same time I have yet to hear from another user with stats - mine could be among the busiest until proven otherwise. That would mean I might run into things that others might not (as much) - which is the point of this discussion. I know what your use is, although it appears you don’t have stats (google analytics is free and requires only a small code injection).

BTW, my forum is not getting slow yet - even at those stats. But we currently have an “energy crisis” in this country and since my topic is about that, I am experiencing vastly more traffic than before. Rather than learn the hard way, I like to keep an eye on things as they progress.

There are so many variables as to Apache settings, mysql confs, php and perl versions (the ad banners use perl), etc…... we are starting to tune up those things in anticipation of even more traffic as it gets colder. I’m usually purposely a couple of versions behind in those packages….but I may have to modernize if the newest are much more efficient, etc.

Up until now I have always simply used brute force (dedicated server at relatively light load)...but sooner or later if growth continues, I am going to have to get smarter.

Hi,

I’m interested in this as in the process of converting from a large(ish) PHPBB build to EE forums (so I can integrate the site as a whole). The forums currently get around 50k+ page views a day with around a million posts.

So, no stats as of yet but will follow this thread with interest. I’m in the process of getting a new server (dual quad-core AMD Opteron and 16Gb of RAM) so hoping for no hardware constraints.

Ah, I knew this subject would be important to others!

Well, we are up to about 300,000 posts - and I don’t see any problem there as that is mysql stuff - a million posts should be easily doable.

But we are hitting your 50K forum page views per day - total site gets closer 60K page views. My forum also loads up two banner ads from a perl script or google for each page viewed, so that is additional load.

The server you are planning is at least double the power of mine, and mine is doing the job. Of course, the load is not spread out perfectly, so that means a heavy load at some hours - but not even one complaint yet from users.

I do think that I am starting to slowly run up against the server capacity - but most of that is not EE’s fault - I have older versions of the underlying software and also never highly tuned the configs, etc. - a really rough guess is that I could handle 50% more before burping to hard - say 75,000 page views of the forum and 15,000 additional page views of other EE stuff and static pages. Again, all have banners on them….which add greatly to the load. In my case, such a load would probably equate to 15 to 20,000 users in a day. Any more than that, and I will run into server issues as well as bandwidth too, since my package is a burstable 1Mbs. See enclosed chart for recent use - this should at least give you an indication of what you are doing.