Increasing Speed & Reducing Bandwith in Your Forum
By: Allen Ayres

Everyone wants to improve the user experience for those who visit their site. That's why UBBDev was formed, to assist you in that endeavor. This month we present a good number of tips to improve your user's experience with a side-benefit of reducing your site's bandwidth, in most cases tremendously. <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

We'll start with a few basic tips anyone can use on any version UBB™. These are basic setup tips that your members will love you for, as they will enjoy visiting your site more because they spend less time waiting.

Basic Forum Setup

• Configure threads to only have 15 posts per page
• Configure forums to only have 25-35 topics max per page
• Set default topic view to 10 days or less
• Check "No, do not use inline frames"
• For those running the new 6.1.0 betas, the UBB Accelerator written by Philipp Esselbach can be turned on if your web host has a recent version of php installed. For more info, Check Here .

These reduce the amount of threads/posts actually downloaded to the end-user, there-by reducing bandwidth and improving "percieved" speed, as the pages download much faster.

File Size Reduction

• Optimize your graphics, reducing the size of them until just before quality begins to suffer
• Optimize the html in the header/footer, removing un-necessary table tags (if you've added these and used a wysiwyg html editor like front page or dreamweaver, there's probably a *lot* of extra table tags in there

These also reduce the amount of download produced and are just good practice for any web development done.

Modifications, Beyond the Basics

Here are a few extra tips for those who don't mind a little extra time to make a huge difference.

You can use the cgi_buffer perl module to compress your files if you are able to install perl modules to the server, sends 80-120kb files to the user as 7-11kb files... much faster and a huge bandwidth saver. Not all servers support this one, but a good number do and it only takes a few minutes to find out.

You can get more info about it here:

Infopop's forums and here: UBBDev's forums

XHTML templates are available for 6.1 and will be updated to the final version once released, they make a difference in render speed as well.

Those are here , but in beta and most likely do not match your version, wait until final 6.1.0 release:

Dedicated Server Owner Tips

If you are moving to/running a dedicated server, be sure and install the latest verion of activestate perl and php, they'll both come in handy for 6.1.0 <IMG SRC="smilies/wink.gif" border="0"> You should be able to use the PerlIS.dll for mapping your perl/cgi scripts with the latest version of perl (629), tho we are investigating it to see if they've worked all the bugs out of it yet. It does give a small performance boost as well.

Server setup:

• Make sure you have scsi hard-drives, their fat data pipes serve up pages/data much faster than IDE drives and will make a huge difference on busy sites. The new 15k RPM drives fly!
• "As much Ram memory as you can afford" applies to any server setup, ones that run forums in particular
• Processor speed is important, especially when using the new ubb accelerator for 6.1, tho dual processor's probably do not provide much if any additional assistance.
• Always keep your software updated to the latest version, they are produced for a reason, usually to provide more stability, improve efficiancy, and patch security holes.
• Mapping your Perl and Php scripts to the .dll may have some benefit in performance as well, tho there are still a few bugs to be worked out of the php and perl base code before it is as useful as it can be.

I trust this has proved useful to most of you, if you have more tips, start a thread in our chit chat forum and we'd be happy to discuss this with you. <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">