How Bad Advice Can End Up Costing You

[Zwielicht]

When I was setting up Office Outlaw, it was my first time setting up a Xenforo forum from scratch. So, I started reading as much about starting forums as I could.

One of the topics I had to learn more about was determining and allocating server resources.

Upon reading about server requirements for Xenforo, I was seeing all sorts of different answers on what was required, specifically in terms of how much RAM you need on your server.

It's like everybody had a different answer, but all of them seemed to think that over 4-8GB of RAM was necessary for a forum that doesn't even have any traffic. Even more RAM was needed if you were planning on installing add-ons.

There were people swearing up and down that they were right based on their many years of experience running a forum. Because of the vast number of topics I had to learn about in a short span of time, I went with what I thought was the safer bet of 4GB of RAM, which ended up costing me quite a bit more each month than if I had gone with 2GB on my VPS.

After having an active forum with loads of add-ons here for 5 months, we're only using 0.5GB of RAM at most even on peak days. As a result of this, I ended up halving the amount of RAM on my VPS to save money and just paid for the hosting a year in advance. However, if I had known this from the start, I could've saved an extra $50 over the last several months.

Now, maybe those other forum owners weren't completely full of it or they had unoptimised forums, I don't know. Although, it goes to show that you should never blindly take advice and always re-check anything you do, especially if it's something you're new to.

 

[t2van]

I think it depends on what sort of set up they have as well, if they got shared resources or if you have dedicated ram or not the same as CPU

Our server is dedicated 8GB Ram we don't even get close to hitting all of that 4gb maybe at peak.

Biggest thing I found was setting up a decent cache and tmp directory that auto empties the files every 30ish days and having a large enough swap disk.

The other thing to note as well is people often forget to update and configure php.ini you want memory resources set to 2048M and so on with 8gb rather than the default 64M!

Well configured is better than hardware any day of the week

 

[tiiberius]

I think they were actually right and their setup is super unoptimized.

Like a WP install when you go crazy with the plugins and themes.
Everything will get slowed down eventually.

 

[Dopious]

Like a WP install when you go crazy with the plugins and themes.

Yes, when it comes to plugins the biggest problem I see out there is not the amount of plugins, but people chose plugins that are badly optimized in it`s coding, you can really slam 40 good coded plugins that perform better than a 10 plugin setup with shitty coded plugins.

 

[polecat]

Server management can get complex or full time just working with someone forum or cms or other softwares

 

[Rem]

It's also because how RAM actually works

When you have more RAM to go around, it may give more room to cache and buffer for each app to make things faster.
From db servers like ur SQL to app layers or OS and caching.
Also, for those forum builders who assigned it 5GB ram, just because it is assigned 5GB ram, doesn't mean its actively always using 5GM ram constantly. It just alot more room for spikes and what not.

At the end, just like normal PC ram, if it runs out of allocated RAM, it will fall back to your ssd, to continue to process until that job is done/ram is freed up. This is the bottlenecks and slowness you may experience.

I'm very positive a forum does not run 5GB ram when done correctly unless its

super unoptimized.

and add-ons from indie devs are usually always super unoptimized.
(Same as WP plugins) hence why the rule of thumb has always been
Create your own, or put only what you REALLY need.

 

[Dopious]

From db servers like ur SQL

Yes, using something like Redis is worth any penny for speed on web applications.