Did not know about the
cloudflare planning to open CDN in India. But to be honest CloudFlare would never work out properly for Indian traffic because of the huge number of Indian IP ranges blocked by CloudFlare.
Maybe the Nginx errors were from CloudFlare. If I remember correctly CloudFlare uses Nginx though I have tested them in beta phase and left them in beta phase as well.
😛 Buddy I also do not have a lot of technical expertise. In fact, I have never taken a single computer course in my whole life to be honest but I have learned everything on my known.
Google is your best friend and you can virtually learn anything you wish. After making the post yesterday, when I went to the feedback forum for some reason I saw the cloudflare thread too. If you are using it for server resources, then I would advise you to test out some reverse proxy. I would personally not recommend changing the whole platform to Nginx as that would need massive rewriting and might create problems too in compatibility. But you can use either Nginx, Varnish or FastCgi etc. and they would easily reduce the server load. The reason for server load and RAM usage in Apache is mainly due to the inability of Apache to handle a lot of simultaneous connections. A reverse proxy easily solves it as they can handle upto thousands of concurrent connections easily at a time. They are a must especially with the deadly combination of Indian traffic + low CTR (for forums and that too tech
😛 ) + high traffic resulting in high load. I have personally found Varnish the easiest to configure though I have never tried out in vbulletin but it has reduced load significantly in one of my servers using
Wordpress with file downloads within wordpress. Here is a thread in vbulletin for comparing Apache + Varnish with others.
https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry.php/2452-Boosting-vBulletin-performance-via-caching-Apache-Varnish-versus-Litespeed-Cache
And here is another article describing it.
Running vBulletin Cluster Using Varnish | UNIXy
Unixy is a reputed and somewhat trusted US based dedicated service provider and I can see that they are also providing Varnish configuration for a one time fee. You can even opt for such services if you are not sure. In fact, I have recently got a managed dedicated server instead of an unmanaged one for the same season of not being that great at server management. But reverse proxy is still that difficult.
It works like this
You set up the reverse proxy using Varnish or Nginx etc. as the front end on the normal http port 80 (I hope I remember the port number correctly
😛 )
Then you set up Varnish/Nginx to provide the users with the static pages, cached pages etc. in case it is request for static content. If it is not static and dynamic content then the reverse proxy would send it to your Apache port. You need to configure Apache to a different port in such a scenario instead of the default 80. I setup Varnish within a single day after searching for tutorials and understanding the process. I have however improved it a lot gradually by manipulating settings and configs making it almost flawless in a month or so but setting up did not take time. I had downloads etc. and so, the main bug was timing out in reaching the Apache backend due to slow internet connections of some users who took like half an hour to download a single 20 MB file. Even with many big sites they would have probably timed out with such dialup level speeds. But I fixed that too but in case of vbulletin there should not a problem as there is no need for massive file being downloaded or backend getting timed out for the same. In vbulletin it should work out of the box though I have left forums years ago due to the headaches attached with the same. So, not sure but it should be pretty simple. At least, many users have confessed Nginx improving the server load massively in high traffic forums and I don't see any reason why Varnish should not provide similar result too.
Here is the official varnish site
https://www.varnish-cache.org/
But one problem with varnish might be that the caching might often result in guests being able to see hidden posts etc. for a member based site like Vbulletin. On a second thought, Nginx as the frontend might still be better.
😛 Nginx is the boss to be honest. They reduce server costs significantly. It is not without reason that mammoth websites such as youtube, wordpress.com, rambler (they are the creators infact) etc. use it for their servers. Litespeed can also give similar results but it is not free.
Here is a vbulletin thread for Varnish config for Vb 4
https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/372517-Varnish-2.1.5-VCL-Configuration-for-vBulletin-share-yours
Another tl dr post. Phew. Ignore it if not needed.
ooh. cloudflare plans to eventually have a CDN in India.
but i would find it weird that hayai would be using them for their official website simply because it would not become part of the hayai zone
😛
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and i do not use nginx.
😱 i want to but i don't because i do not have the technical expertise to run it
😀
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those errors were probably served by cloudflare and not my server. my service is a regular apache based machine.