There are a lot of settings in IPB - some affect how things are displayed, some affect how things perform. Above all other settings, the following have the most impact on the performance of your site.

It is up to you to decide if you wish to use these settings, but we recommend the following
  • Search Set-Up -> Type of search to use? - This should ALWAYS be set to Fulltext (unless you use something else, like Sphinx, which actually performs better). Never use manual, if you are concerned with performance. Fulltext search provides as much as 50% improvement in searching performance.
  • CPU Saving & Optimization -> Update topic views immediately? - Unless your members freak out seeing 0 views but 10 replies, set this to "No". It provides a huge performance benefit, in that the ibf_topics table does not need to be locked entirely every time a topic is viewed. Given that viewing topics is the most common activity in a forum, this can save thousands of table locks an hour.
  • CPU Saving & Optimization -> Use multi-byte safe wordwrap - Unless you have a multibyte language set (and I'm not just talking about using UTF-8 as your character set) leave this on "No". The operations that IPB has to perform to try to cut the strings properly are much more expensive when it's trying to take into account multi-byte languages than when it can just run the PHP "wordwrap" function.
  • Forum Configuration (Editing a Forum's Settings) -> Default date cut off for topic display - Setting this to anything other than "Show All" actually causes it to perform worse than it has to. The reason is an extra query is run when you are pruning topics by date to gather the valid data for page links and such. Unless you have a good reason, just leave this on "Show All".
    You can try running this query to accomplish this quickly.
    [sql]UPDATE ibf_forums SET prune=100 WHERE 1[/sql]
    or to apply it to forums only, not categories
    [sql]UPDATE ibf_forums SET prune=100 WHERE parent > 0[/sql]
There are other CPU Saving settings, but above any others these have the most impact.
Lease Reviewed by Lease on . [TUT]IPB Settings that make a performance difference There are a lot of settings in IPB - some affect how things are displayed, some affect how things perform. Above all other settings, the following have the most impact on the performance of your site. It is up to you to decide if you wish to use these settings, but we recommend the following Search Set-Up -> Type of search to use? - This should ALWAYS be set to Fulltext (unless you use something else, like Sphinx, which actually performs better). Never use manual, if you are concerned Rating: 5