Hi,

What kind of caching does Gossamer Forums have? Is the database hit for every page that's generated? Also, I have a fairly high traffic board, and it generates considerable amounts of bandwidth. Is there support for page compression in Gossamer Forums (ie the "Content-Encoding: gzip" header)?

Thanks!

Joe
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Christianity.com Forums

Hi,

Gossamer Forum does access the database on each request, and it does not support gzipping output.

In regards to gzip, I believe it's better to do this on the web server level rather then the application. If you are using Apache 1.x, you can use mod_gzip to compress output of all your scripts including Gossamer Forum. We have this standard on our server setup and on a heavily trafficed forum it can cut your bandwidth by up to 70% (one of our hosting clients runs a heavy forum and without mod_gzip they do 1500 kbp/s of bandwidth, but with it enabled, it's down to 400 kbp/s). Apache 2.x has mod_deflate standard that can also accomplish the same thing.

In terms of caching, also, a lot of this can be done on the server level. For instance, we use mysql4 quite a bit and it has a query cache built in that will cache exact sql requests. We find this greatly speeds up all SQL applications without sacrificing the real time feel of a forum (i.e. seeing stale data on the home page).

If you'd like help on getting the server setup optimally for a heavily run forum, don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.

...and template compression in the admin panel.

True, but you won't see much savings if you are using gzip (as gzip compresses output by about 85%), and most of the work template compression does gzip does much better. =)

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Thanks for the info Alex. One more question, what kind of stats is this support forum getting (pageviews / day, users / day, bandwidth / month)? And along with those stats, what kind of hardware is the forum running (CPU, RAM, HD)? I'd just like to get a rough feel for what hardware is needed to keep the forums quick and snappy for my users. My forums is currently getting ~2 million pageviews / month. Please PM or email me if you would rather not discuss this on the board. Thanks!

Joe
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Christianity.com Forums