What are the BEST settings?!?!?

[hostonnet]

Disable Guest Limit, also enable cache.

[gpj]

Disable Guest Limit, also enable cache.

What does enabling cache do?

Can I DELETE the cache after a certain time?

[hostonnet]

Cache save generated page for certain time, after the set time, cache expire, generate new page. Only problem is new videos take little time to get displayed. But for a busy site this won't be a problem.

[bplex]

That post above is a bit confusing and sort of difficult to understand.

PHP is what is known as a interpreted language. This means that the PHP code is indirectly executed by a program known as an interpreter. Every time someone visits your site, the PHP page that is being executed is run through the interpreter, compiled into some machine binary language (usually a bytecode of some sort), processed, outputted, and then destroyed. Caching helps to speed up your site by placing a time limit (called a "wait") on the "destroyed" action. By not destroying the binary form of the page each time someone visits the page, you speed up your site by not having to do two steps (compile the page and destroy it at the end).

Turning on caching does have its drawbacks. The first is that the cache remains in tact until either the "wait" period is reached or a significant change to the original file is detected. If you make minor changes to your files, you may never see your changed results. Two, turning on caching, in vShare, will result in two caches being built. The first cache is the normal template caching that is done automatically. The second is the PHP file caching. Essentially, your system has to now maintain two caches instead of maintaining the normal amount of one. Finally, caching only helps for sites that are experiencing high load due to either low CPU or low memory. It does not solve the issue that 99.99% of all vShare users who are experiencing slow performance have.

Speaking of that, the BIGGEST issue that 99.99% of all vShare users will experience has to do with one thing... the hard drive! It is the one thing that no one ever thinks about because most people (outside of IT or very technical webmasters) understand this issue at hand. So, I'll explain:

Rhetorical question, but I'll ask it anyway... Using the normal vShare settings, how many visitors can the average vShare server sustain at one time?

The answer? No more than 1,000 simultaneous users!

How and why?

This happens because of something that most hosts never talk about or advertise... disk I/O. Disk I/O (or Disk Input/Output) is the amount of data that the hard drive can process per second (also known as IOps). On budget servers and cheap VPSs, the average amount of Disk I/O that you will ever see is around 50-60 MBps (megabytes per second). With the standard vShare settings, each video consumes approximately 62KBps (kilobytes per second). If you multiply that out, that means that at most, you can have 1,000 users at any given time. But, that is a theoretical number because that 50-60MBps limit is for the entire hard drive and not just vShare (this includes the server OS, other software running on the server itself, and your site). So, in real world use, you probably would start to have issues with a few hundred simultaneous users on the typical server/VPS.

So, if you want to talk about real things that can be done to optimize your site for high traffic, here is what I would do:

1. Multiple video servers (spread out the load onto multiple servers. Each server doubles the amount of simultaneous visitors that I can have. In this case, having multiple smaller servers rather than fewer bigger (as in large HDDs) servers is smarter.

2. Consider cloud servers or VPS/VDS servers that use SAN storage and not local disk storage. SAN storage offers you the ability store your data onto many HDDs. You may only have 100GB of space, but that space could be spread across 10 HDDs which is really good for performance.

3. As your site gets larger, you may need to move mySQL and other disk/CPU intensive processes to other servers. This helps to spread CPU load.

[gpj]

will it effect the site if i delete the contents of the /cache/ folder?

[bplex]

No, you can delete the contents of the cache folder at any time. It will not cause any issues.