As one of my recent side projects, I needed a forum and whilst there are many options out there, I decided on Vanilla Forums. Unfortunately, the documentation for installing Vanilla Forums on your own server is lacking, especially if you're concerned about performance. To help, I'll explain in this guide how to install and achieve the best possible performance on your own Vanilla Forums install.
For this, I'm assuming you're going to be installing Vanilla Forums on your own VPS or dedicated server. Bits and pieces of these instructions may be helpful for intalling on shared hosting but are certainly not tailored for that. I also presume you have basic Unix/Linux knowledge.
These instructions will work on a standard Ubuntu server installation and should be easily modified to fit other Linux distributions.
As Vanilla Forums is written in PHP, and PHP is not the fastest language around, it's not a bad idea to start there. If you're happy with package managers handling the versioning, it's quite straight forward in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-gd php5-curl php5-memcache php5-mysql php5-cli php5-cgi php5-fpm spawn-fcgi php-apc
This installs...
Performance Point: The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is one of the most commonly overlooked tools in your speed arsenal.
Just by turning it on you can improve page load and requests per second by caching PHP opcodes from previous requests.
On my install of Vanilla Forums on modest hardware, enabling PHP-APC increases the requests per second from 26 to 57.
Unless you have a particular reason to go with Apache, Nginx will provide a speedier and somewhat less painful experience than Apache. Running sudo apt-get install nginx is all you really need.
For setting up PHP on Nginx, following the guides at Linode will work fine whilst the Nginx configuration to run Vanilla Forums can be gleaned as well.
Vanilla Forums is backed by MySQL or a compatible replacement such as Percona Server. Looking at the state of the database abstraction layer, I don't see it supporting any other database backends in the near future.
Percona has been shown to improve many types of queries and is a drop-in replacement. This means that if you find your database having trouble in the future, you can trivially move from MySQL to Percona Server just by restarting your server.
Memcache is an enormous performance booster, especially for pages with common database queries, and is a fundamental tool in any large scale website.
Assuming you only want to use a local memcache instance, adding it is trivial. Running sudo apt-get install memcached will get you a service on Ubuntu that runs with sane defaults and launches memcached as a service.
Then you can add to conf/config.php two simple lines:
$Configuration['Cache']['Enabled'] = TRUE; $Configuration['Cache']['Method'] = 'memcache';
Performance Point: Adding memcached results in a significant performance increase, from 44 requests per second up to 57 for the main page. Depending on the pages visited and the underlying use of cache by the given controller and view, this may be higher or lower on other pages.
To ensure that it's working as expected, you can check Memcache's stats by issuing the command echo stats | nc 127.0.0.1 11211.
If get_hits increases as you reload your page (I'd suggest testing with something similar to Apache's bechmark tool ab), then your memcache install is working.
There are numerous tools to load test your website with, but the simplest is Apache Benchmark, or ab, that comes with apache2-utils.
Hopefully you'll see performance increases in line with mine. If not, keep calm, tweak, benchmark, and then smile as the numbers make you feel better. Good luck! =]
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