Site slowdown using VBSeo, need suggestions....

I recently moved my site from a shared hosting environment to a small VPS. The VPS has 768Mb ram with 1.5GB burstable. Ever since doing so, the site crawls when hitting 200+ users online.

I took measures to try and improve things, the first thing was to put nginx in front of Apache as a proxy for non-php files. That helped but still I experienced dismal performance.

Today, in addition to a number of small changes, I disabled VBSeo completely both at the VBSeo control panel and at VB's plugin controller. Surprisingly, the site now flies, with some users claiming it is the fastest it has been in 2 years. That surprised me greatly and worried me at the same time.

Now, I have/had the VBSEO rewrite rules in the sites .htaccess file and was thinking that if I moved it into httpd.conf it would make any difference. I am lothe to do so though as I don't want to affect the performance any more than I have to, especially with limited resources available.

I am also preparing another server that does away with Apache altogether and uses nginx with php-fpm. Once again, I am unsure if I should implement VBSEO in that environment as I am after pure speed and after tonight's experience.... well you can see where I am heading.

Can anyone suggest a course of action I might look at for use under either/or Apache or nginx to reinstate the use of VBSEO?

Cheers
Bruce

Are you by any chance using the limit url length setting with a value of anything other than 0? That is the only known setting that can cause a loop if set incorrectly and add a ton of load/processing time.

see also:
vBSEO Optimization Tips - vBulletin SEO Forums

Good question actually Brian. I have been using the "set and forget" method and have had the same settings since I started with vbseo, I think I used the other Brians suggestions and stayed with it. I'll have to refresh my memory now as to where that setting is located so I can check....

Its the setting just above the preset drop downs in 3.3.2

Limit URL Length
Some users prefer to limit the length of their URLs. This setting "crops" URL parts, i.e. [forum_title] and [thread_title] to a maximum number of keywords.
NOTE: Set this parameter to zero (0) for unlimited length.

Thanks Brian, I'll check it out.

I am using 3.5.0 on my vb 3.8.4 forum. I do however see that briansols guide and xml file aren't really suitable for anything above 3.2 so that could be where some of the problems lie. What I really need is to find a how-to/guide for the newer features.......

As long as you didn't IMPORT that settings file, but rather upgraded SINCE 3.2 era when you initially imported the settings file, the file presets are fine to use, and that url length setting would be set to 0.

There isn't much new in 3.5 for vb3. Most of the new stuff is for vb4 compatibility.

Ah, OK.... no I didn't import the xml file into 3.5.x, it's been there since I started using vBSEO. Off to check thing now and reintroduce to see what happens. It's really only above 200 user online that things went haywire....

You may just need to do some tweaking to your mysql config files. See if you can get eva2000 over at vb.com server tweak section to offer you some suggestions.

Been there, done that I have 2 threads running over there at the moment on that very subject The one I have at the moment, in combination with httpd.conf tweaks, is working quite well..... without vBSEO that is. The trick is getting vBSEO back again without affecting the current speed - my users would kill me if I did! They are loving how quick it is now, some even claim it can be too fast! If I supply the xml file, could someone have a quick look to see if they can spot anything?

That limit setting is the only killer. Everything else really won't matter. Plus, you're using one of the better for speed files already, being that it's mostly ID based

Found the setting in question and all is good. Will check out the rest and try a few things before turning back on for the test. Will also upgrade to 3.5.1 while I am at it.

Well, it is unfortunate but I can not use vBSEO any longer on my VPS server, at least not under Apache. I installed the very latest, double checked the settings and added the rewrite rules directly into httpd.conf. At the 200+ users online mark, the site hit a wall and apache process went through the roof. A quick deletion of rewrite rules and turning off vBSEO brought it back to the speed my users are used to, hardly a blip at 200+ online.

I will reintroduce vBSEO when I go 100% nginx as a test, hopefully it will perform better under that. As for now, well all my links in Google mean squat now.......