Woohoo! I've been working on ways to make these forums faster by doing many things like:
(image: Google)
I'm very proud! This is one of the fastest vBulletin-powered sites on the web. I'm really hoping the next time stats are updated, we'll be "in the green"
- Cleaning up, rewriting and combining JavaScript files (the features that make using the site easy)
- Removing the need to refresh the page everytime someone wants to see an update
- Removing all images from the layout and combining them into an 'image sprite' for faster loading
- Designing the entire site without < table >'s and completely with stylesheets (unlike 99% other forums)
- Performing daily optimizations to the forum databases
- Caching certain pages for faster loading
- Recently replacing the YouTube auto-embedding feature with the newest version of the YouTube player which is fast
- Restricting certain features for lurkers
- Optimizing database lookups (almost all the content you see here is stored in a database)
- Upgrading the server, optimizing it specifically for all of the members usage patterns
- Buying a second server to host images and other files
- and recently performing some more optimizations!
(image: Google)
I'm very proud! This is one of the fastest vBulletin-powered sites on the web. I'm really hoping the next time stats are updated, we'll be "in the green"