I was hoping someone with server-side smarts would answer, but since no one did I'll throw out my uneducated guess here.

1. Make sure your skin is NOT loaded with all the bells and whistles under the sun. Are you going to have categories listed in the sidebar? If so maybe you don't need them in your post body? Also don't bother with links to comments AND trackbacks AND pingbacks in each blog post since

$Item->feedback_link( 'feedbacks' );

covers all of them. Do you really need a message form email link in each post? Probably not since people can leave comments fairly easily eh?

Also ditch inline RDF and any visible links to it and RSS092. It's cool for b2evolution to support the 4 big flavors, but there's 2 really big ones and 2 that had their day way back when, so go with RSS2 and ATOM1 and be happy.

If you kill trackbacks you won't save your server but you will shut down spammers who like that path. Off topic?

Also watch your plugins. I'm pretty sure that b2evolution thinks about all the plugins each time it makes a post for a page whether the plugin is used or not, so the less you have the less your server will have to think about. Delete them if you're not going to use them. There's a heck of a lot of plugins that get shipped and you probably don't *need* all of them.

Don't allow skin switching. It means more maintenance on your end, and the server will have to create and kick out that list each time it makes a page. More work for you and it, so dump it.

This is all light-weight stuff, but since you've gotten no answer ...

By the way there are a couple of installations out there with ~1000 blogs/bloggers, and they survive just fine. Obviously your server has to be able to handle the traffic, but after that some thinking on what you put in your skin will help quite a bit. I think!

Thanks for the tips. It looks like mgmt is teetering on the brink of using b2 as the solution so I'll share our findings with the class.

I don't think we'll be able to performance-tune the mysql config but we'll get some feedback from the admins regarding our performance.

I'm going to try and run httpd_load against the install and see if I can slow the server down.

Thanks again and cheers.

EdB wrote:

By the way there are a couple of installations out there with ~1000 blogs/bloggers, and they survive just fine. Obviously your server has to be able to handle the traffic, but after that some thinking on what you put in your skin will help quite a bit. I think!

Could you give an example link to one of such ~1000 blogs/bloggers implementation, pls?