I spend a lot of time dealing with our clients that have larger clusters or planning new cluster deployments. I cannot help to feel that I am re-inventing the wheel over and over. Surely someone has had this issue before? Surely someone had had this performance question? Surprisingly, finding reliable answers to technical questions can be notoriously difficult. Consider the recent VB forum migration we did.
Frmtr.com is a massive Vbulletin forum with over 8,000,000 posts. One of the most popular in Turkey. They had been struggling keeping the site stable. So we had a good challenge ahead of us to improve stability and increase performance.
Running on CentOS 5, we proceed to build out a LAMP stack. Some add-ons to VB, such as vBSEO complicated some scalability efforts, so we needed a new solution.
In past projects, we've found that Lightty, an alternative HTTP server, proved very efficient and running pure-PHP apps. So, I began digging around for configuration guidance on putting together a Lighttpd-based system for VB.
Though I found some posts in VB's very active community forums, there was no real information to be had. We had to start from the beginning and build up our solution.
A few days later, we had developed a very robust Lighttpd+FastCGI+Memache+Xcache framework that reduced site load times by nearly 50% and resolved the stability issues.
Now all of this is a long way to get back to a point that Isabel Wang made about Softlayer's Developer Network. While networking servers is can be challenging. It is not where near the challenge of networking people.
We work with SoftLayer daily and not once have I seen something from the developer network that says, "hey, we just deployed a very busy discussion forum using X, Y and Z. Here's the hardware we used, here's the app-stack we used, and here's the info for you to use."
Do they or any other server provider know how many MySQL installations are running on Intel vs. AMD or using 4GB vs. 8GB of RAM? Probably not. Why should they care? Providing examples of how your services solves problems is great way to help other people (read: future clients) solve their problems.
Consider the VB forum optimization we just completed. What if VB provided a solutions center where they tapped some of their largest users to develop a consensus of what works? They don't even maintain stats like size of forums, number of web servers used for forums of X size. That information would be a huge value to someone that had a growing forum. That information may be more valuable than the product itself. People may switch from PHPBB just because there is an good community and they don't have to re-invent the wheel.
FYI: Once we wrap up this VB deployment, we will write up some short notes on what we found worked best.
