After a month and a half long donation drive and 2 weeks of waiting, ordering, and waiting, it is finally here. The new NCAAbbs Server (Actually two if you want to get technical) will fix our load issues with massive crowds and bring stability to the server for several years.

(Each image links to a ultra hi-res image)

And here’s a breakdown of the costs for the new server:

Annual Hosting (current server) ———–588.00
(4) Hard Drives Raptor 10K RPM 150Gb—–739.96
(4) 1Gb Memory Sticks——————–279.96
(2) Xeon Quad Core Intel Procs————703.98
(1) SuperMicro Rack Server Cluster——–1489.99

We’ll be upgrading to a 4U Rack at our datacenter (They’re all out of 2U’s) and setup one of the servers to “master” and the other two to “slaves” with replication technologies. I’ll also be back porting some MyBB 1.4 code for this special occasion (The master/slave technologies)

If everything goes well this should be up within the next few weeks; If you want to stay updated check out the NCAAbbs forum here: http://www.ncaabbs.com - Updates will be in the “Lounge -> Sports Bar Main” forum.

Feel free to ask questions below and I’ll be happy to answer.

Warning: The following tutorial is for MyBB forums only. Instructions for other forum software may vary.

I’ve recently been noticing large forums coming to MyBB. One for example is http://www.talkvideogames.com/ with nearly half a million posts, taking up position #2 in place of MsgPlus. So I decided it’s time for a tutorial on how to ensure your server is running fast with MyBB:

1) Change the mybb_sessions table to a HEAP (or MEMORY) type. This will ensure that the table is stored in memory. It won’t cause problems because it’ll be truncated often (sessions 24 hours or older are trimmed at random)

2) Make sure your kernel, mysql, php, and all extensions are up-to-date.

3) Install Zend, eAccelerator, and or memcache extensions for php. MyBB 1.4 will take advantage of eAccelerator / memcache. Installing APC (Advanced PHP Cache) is usually worth it too.

4) Turn on the MySQL Query Cache if it isn’t on already.

5) Remove PHP extensions that you don’t use - you can always turn them on later if need be.

6)  Optimize your tables weekly using a cron job of some sort

Just a note; MyBB 1.4 will continue to provide continual speed improvements for you and your forum. Things like the new task system will allow you to manage your forum better and more easily.