Multiple Forums On Server Sharing One Set Of vBSEO Files

[Jafo]

Recently I developed this vBulletin mod:

Dynamically Linked Source - Speed Up Your Multiple Site Network & Upgrades - vBulletin.org Forum

And we have been working on way to include vBSEO to use the same method. Was just curious if there is any interest in here for such a thing? We plan on posting the details freely here and at vb.org.

We have found that this saves a massive amount of overhead when using multiple sites on a server or cluster that all use Vbulletin and vBSEO..

[Brandon Sheley]

We are doing this in the Crowdgather - Find it on Forums network, but we don't plan to release a mod ATM.

[Joe Ward]

Sure - we would be interested in the details.

[Jafo]

We had to get a little tricky with it because vBSEO needs to write to the config file. Ideally (for our purposes) it would be great if this was no longer necessary. There are probably better ways to do this, but for our needs, it works well.

If you follow the directions of this plugin:

Dynamically Linked Source - Speed Up Your Multiple Site Network & Upgrades - vBulletin.org Forum

It will explain how you set up the central repository for the source code files of vBulletin. The method we are using to do this with vBSEO piggy backs on top of it.

In the includes/configs directory (see plugin readme) you want to add the vbseo_globals.php file attached to this post and edit as directed in the file.

You add all of the vBSEO files to the repository (the DLS), EXCEPT the vbseo_config.php file.

You can either create an .htaccess file or add directly to httpd.conf for each site, with this code:

php_value auto_prepend_file '/home/vbcore/includes/configs/vbseo_globals.php'

Obviously you need to change the path in this directive. This needs to be the absolute path to the vbseo_globals.php file in the repository (DLS).

Execute the symlinking script from the plugin package (php-clone.php) and you should be all set.

Each site will use the same files (except for vbseo_config.php). They will only be cached once, instead of multiple times for each site. So basically if you are running two forums on one server and you use this method, you have just about cut the memory usage in half (providing your using opcode caching of some kind), and greatly improved effeciency.

I have included an image of the results we received when using this with just vBulletin, and you can see the dramatic results on server load. We are compiling stats now for vBSEO usage on the DLS. So far the results are very encouraging. From anecdotal evidence (i.e. every time I view "top" on the network) I can tell you that server load has dropped almost 40%. The network we are testing this on has five rather large forums working on three load balanced servers.

[Jafo]

Added a month view of the DLS w/out vBSEO. We added the sites to DLS in July, you can see the noticeable results.