My site is a News portal where the two most popular modules are News and Forum. I've also configured the site so that only registered users can post news comments or forum threads.

Like many of us, I'm also experiencing performance challenges and have been experimenting with cachine and other techniques to keep my site running. I just moved to dedicated hosting and still had 2 db unavailable errors just today.

I'd like to cache the News and Forum modules, except that when I turn caching on for News I notice that I can be logged into the site and yet, the article I'm reading is cached without the Post Comment button at the bottom of the page.

I have to offer the ability to Post Comments to registered users, yet caching this module is something I haven't been able to do. I'm also getting the same behavior with newbb Forum module.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I notice that XOOPS.org has 2x the number of on-line users that I have. Do you guys cache News and Forum?

Thanks,
-Robert

Quote:
Ahh, the tricky question.
First the facts: Xoops.org does not use the Smarty caching of News and Forum because of what you yourself found out: If we do, we will have erratic behaviour when it comes to links such as comment posting and news editing.

However, we do use a lower-level caching system called Turk MM Cache that caches the PHP script (in a way I don't know anything about ) it runs quite well, our server admin tells us.

Comments and Forum pages are quite difficult to cache because not only does the content change by group (whether you are allowed to post comments/posts or not) it also depends on who you are (are you the author of this post/comment? If so, you can edit, if not, you cannot) and therefore the page has to be generated for each user. I guess it is possible to do something about it for anonymous, but logged in users have to be differentiated on each pageview.

We handle it by having a dedicated server for the xoops.org websites and database and by accepting that response times are not always optimal. We aim at bringing a bigger server into production in the near future, but that is "just" hardware and not always feasible for others.

Sorry that I cannot be of more help to you.

Thanks very much for your response. I pretty much figured this was the situation.

For the record, how is the xoops.org server configured (both hardware and software).

My site is running in a dedicated Virtuozzo machine with the PLESK control panel on a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1Gb RAM and a 80Gb 7200 RPM drive. My hosting provider RackForce says that I have 1.5 GB of available bankwidth to my machine

Today I noticed that with 55 online users (Who's Online Block), response time was very poor and load averages were very high in TOP - early this morning I actually got one of the dreaded XOOPS php error messages that says the MySQL database is unavailble. At that time there were 200 active processes and load averages were way out of line. User counts were only around 65.

I'm having a hard time figuring out where to go next. Do I change hosting providers, add more RAM, add another CPU. I'm probably 6 months away from having 100 - 125 concurrent users and I don't think my current configuration will scale.

On the XOOPS software side, I edited /etc/php.ini to turn off MySQL persistent connections and I've optimized every table in my database.

What recommendations do you genius types have more me?