We did few enhancements to speed up our forums.

There are a few enhancements we made recently that we want to share.

First, we enabled html compression on our servers a few weeks ago. This means that if your browser supports it, the html is zipped up and sent to your browser compressed, and it uncompressed it on the fly. This will speed up all of our sites and forums, since it takes less bandwidth to download.

Second, a day or so ago we added some additional indexes on some of the larger columns in our databases. This also caused a nice speed jump, since standard queries and sorting by these columns is now indexed. Its actually AMAZING that some of these columns weren’t indexed already by the vbulletin folks.

Third, today we are rolling out another compression upgrade. For the most part, you will only see spaces removed from your html. The largest part of the improvement, though, is in our back-end. The templates are actually stored in a compressed format now, which means when we request the templates from our database servers, it takes less bandwidth to deliver them to the web servers. Which means vbulletin actually renders the pages quicker. That, and we DO actually get an additional speed bump by serving less html.

These three things together should make for a much quicker browsing environment for many of us.