I have put off implementing any sort of plugin powered page/content caching since early talk about the idea suggested it may cause problems with dynamic content, like that generated in forums & topic pages.

After experiencing server performance issues again, it has been suggested that we add a caching plugin.

Can anyone recommend a caching plugin and settings to ensure compatibility with SimplePress and the best performance boost?

I'd love to hear from anyone with high traffic or large forums that may be using a caching plugin.

(We currently have 7000+ registered members, with 10515 Topics & 140232 Posts, and up to 100 members online at peak times.)

Or, am I missing some sort of caching and optimization settings in the SP Admin? I have tinkered with DB Pruning a bit, but the value of our community is the archived content members have shared in the forums.

I do frequently maintain the database via PHP MyAdmin, optimizing tables with overhead, etc. just looking for other suggestions...

Thanks in advance for any feedback or recommendations!

Hey Jim,

That is one large forum!

The only caching options within SP as far as I know are the combined CSS / JS caching (Forum > Options > Global Settings) and the 'Gravatar Cache' plugin.

Not sure if you are already using these, but just a note - some servers / hosts don't seem to get on well with CSS caching, so if it doesn't work you can simply turn it off again if not using it already of course. And the Gravatar cache plugin should help some - again if you are not using it already.

As for caching plugins in general the most important option compatibility wise would be the option to exclude a page from being cached. I think W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular, and most importantly I think it also allows you to exclude pages. You can test it by reloading the page and checking the HTML comments to see if the date and time change - if they do then the page is not cached. Although it doesn't directly affect the forum page it might help some, but couldn't say as I've never tried!

Would be interesting to hear from someone with a large forum, and I'm sure Andy or Steve will have something more useful to add!

I am going to need Steve to weigh in here but it feels to me like you should be thinking outside of WordPress now and considering some server side options...

Steve?

you would want to look into some sort of server based opcode caching...  like APC or memcached...  then you will need the equivalent wp plugin...  should give you some lift...  not all flavors of php can use those opcode cachers though..

Hello everyone,

I am hoping I didn't make a mistake, but I recently converted my phpBB board (100,000+ posts) to SimplePress...)

After seeing extremely slow load times, I paid too much money upgrading my server to a brand new dedicated (I was on dedicated before) with quad core 3.3ghz, 16gb of RAM, etc. etc.

Frustrated to see the load times were identical.. SLOW.

Here is a link... I put the load time and query number at the bottom. Sometimes it loads in less than a second, other times, 17+ seconds. PLEASE help.  PHPBB was quick, and I switched because I needed to get away from the previous CMS I was using, but am now regretting it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 

Here is the link: http://www.theblackvault.com/c.....nity/forum

just spent about 15 minutes at your site... with hundreds of page loads...  tried main forum page and some forum view and topic views...  many consecutive loads of the same page...

almost all the time, the loads were less than 1 second...  on rare occasions, the page load was slow (5-10 seconds)...  each time I tracked that, the page was delayed in loading by response to the google ad server as you have a bunch of ads... 

no way to tell for sure how long it was or if the primary cause... but frankly, if the same page is loading every time and on a few loads its slow, something else is at play since the forum stuff is constant...

can you try disabling your ads for a few moments and try more page loads and see if any improvement?

something on your site is also throwing a jquery error...  but not enough info to tell what that is...  See it quite often on fast loads too, so may not be related...

Thank you for the quick response.

I disabled the side ad. The top one, well, please compare to:

http://www.theblackvault.com/d.....ntarchive/

http://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/

Neither of these sites are slow loading, and they are quick to come up. I am not thinking it's Google AdSense.

The homepage was very slow also, so I took off the Widget that loads the recent posts, and it started loading very fast: http://www.theblackvault.com/community/

I have been disabling plugins one by one, and nothing helps...

I would appreciate ANY suggestions... 

I decided to refresh a few times to see... and you can see it's very inconsistent. My server load is low, memory is fine, so I am STUMPED at what this is. 

99 queries. 5.430 seconds.
99 queries. 10.827 seconds.
99 queries. 5.969 seconds.
99 queries. 5.571 seconds.
99 queries. 0.589 seconds.
99 queries. 0.838 seconds.
99 queries. 5.919 seconds.
99 queries. 0.562 seconds.
100 queries. 5.826 seconds.

Just to add to this, I went ahead and disabled the side bar, which had the "recent posts" widget in there as well. It may be a coincidence, but I cleared the cache it for the most part, loading very quickly. Could that widget be the issue? 

I am new to this topic so I have started with opening a whole load of random pages and I don't really see much difference. They all loaded pretty good for me with probably the longest wait just 2-3 of seconds. Why would anybody be unhappy with that?

But - having said that - Mr Papa is correct that there is a jQuery error being reported and there is something wrong with the googlesyndication call. Both will have a small measure of effect.

The main problem that I saw was that I am receiving long lists of http requests resulting in a 404 due to 'x2' images being looked for when they do not exist. In load times all that will have a big, big impact so the performance was even better than I first thought. I assume these non-existant images are being looked for because I am using a retina display. If you can turn them off for the forum it would be a good idea as we do not supply x2 images for all the icons.