It is funny how great length we forum admins and website owners at times go, even to shave off a few milliseconds off of our website’s loading time and to make it run smoother under heavy load. Guess it just becomes a sort of like an obsession at times and I am no different.
Having spent over 4 hours yesterday in getting the Memcache server setup for BCMTouring Forum and slicing up already optimized vBulletin showthread pages to shave off a few more requests and few kilobytes, I am now somewhat satisfied, but still not entirely.
Of course the good news (at least for me) is that the cache server is working wonderfully and even though weekends are quite slow (traffic wise) and we still haven’t gotten around to exploiting it fully, it is still getting a little more than 42 hits a second on average, which is bound to increase during weekdays.
Similarly, finding and removing a few unnecessary elements from showthread pages has enabled us to reduce request per page by around 8.5% and even though it does not translates into similarly significant reduction in the page size, I guess it was well worth the effort and hopefully would result in members having to wait less for the page to start appearing and the webserver having to serve fewer requests, thereby reducing the load slightly as well.
Overall, it was well worth the effort to get up at 5:30 in the morning!
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