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finally we settled with surpasshosting.com and get their dedicated hosting plan ($99 a month, 2000GB transfer, 80G HD, Celeron 1.7GHz, 512MB mem, RedHat 9 + cpanel + WHM).
at first we thought all our problems would go away with a dedicate server and we even thought about renting out the bandwidth to others, however....
later we found out this dedicate server can't even handle our site at peak time (100 ~ 160 users from "Who's Online" module). apache keeps crashing, and the site keeps coming up and down.
i really find it amazing XOOPS can't handle our traffic with this kind of resource since our XOOPS is a very typical one and don't use a lot of modules (only FreeContent). No pconnect is used, and so far no cache is enabled.
I think XOOPS really need A LOT OF work on optimization, having 100 queries when opening up a page (news module with 10 articles per page) is really ridiculous, compare to Invision Powered Board which it only took 9.
maybe our site is the largest site that uses XOOPS? how come no one else seemed to have this kind of problem?