Increasing Speed & Reducing Bandwith in Your ForumBy: Allen Ayres
Everyone wants to improve the user experience for those who visit their site. That's why UBBDev was formed, to assist you in that endeavor. This month we present a good number of tips to improve your user's experience with a side-benefit of reducing your site's bandwidth, in most cases tremendously.
We'll start with a few basic tips anyone can use on any version UBB™. These are basic setup tips that your members will love you for, as they will enjoy visiting your site more because they spend less time waiting.
Basic Forum Setup- Configure threads to only have 15 posts per page
- Configure forums to only have 25-35 topics max per page
- Set default topic view to 10 days or less
- Check "No, do not use inline frames"
- For those running the new 6.1.0 betas, the UBB Accelerator written by Philipp Esselbach can be turned on if your web host has a recent version of php installed. For more info, Check Here .
These reduce the amount of threads/posts actually downloaded to the end-user, there-by reducing bandwidth and improving "percieved" speed, as the pages download much faster.
File Size Reduction- Optimize your graphics, reducing the size of them until just before quality begins to suffer
- Optimize the html in the header/footer, removing un-necessary table tags (if you've added these and used a wysiwyg html editor like front page or dreamweaver, there's probably a *lot* of extra table tags in there
These also reduce the amount of download produced and are just good practice for any web development done.
Modifications, Beyond the BasicsHere are a few extra tips for those who don't mind a little extra time to make a huge difference.
You can use the cgi_buffer perl module to compress your files if you are able to install perl modules to the server, sends 80-120kb files to the user as 7-11kb files...
much faster and a huge bandwidth saver. Not all servers support this one, but a good number do and it only takes a few minutes to find out.
You can get more info about it here:
Infopop's forums and here:
UBBDev's forums XHTML templates are available for 6.1 and will be updated to the final version once released, they make a difference in render speed as well.
Those are
here , but in beta and most likely do not match your version, wait until final 6.1.0 release:
Dedicated Server Owner TipsIf you are moving to/running a dedicated server, be sure and install the latest verion of activestate perl and php, they'll both come in handy for 6.1.0
You should be able to use the PerlIS.dll for mapping your perl/cgi scripts with the latest version of perl (629), tho we are investigating it to see if they've worked all the bugs out of it yet. It does give a small performance boost as well.
Server setup:
- Make sure you have scsi hard-drives, their fat data pipes serve up pages/data much faster than IDE drives and will make a huge difference on busy sites. The new 15k RPM drives fly!
- "As much Ram memory as you can afford" applies to any server setup, ones that run forums in particular
- Processor speed is important, especially when using the new ubb accelerator for 6.1, tho dual processor's probably do not provide much if any additional assistance.
- Always keep your software updated to the latest version, they are produced for a reason, usually to provide more stability, improve efficiancy, and patch security holes.
- Mapping your Perl and Php scripts to the .dll may have some benefit in performance as well, tho there are still a few bugs to be worked out of the php and perl base code before it is as useful as it can be.
I trust this has proved useful to most of you, if you have more tips, start a thread in our chit chat forum and we'd be happy to discuss this with you.
