Neocodex Technology Blog

Currently, Neocodex stores 1,325,357 posts by users in 88,522 topics. Under any measure of the term, I would say that our website has evolved into a large forum. We consistently have over 300 users online at any given time and many more using our autobuyer constantly sending data back to our item database. Such high activity can put quite a strain on our website to perform efficiently. As traffic increases, you might notice that forum responsitivity start to decrease and our server load start to increase . I've certainly been noticing that in the last few weeks. That is why I spent a bit of time today installing the Sphinx Search Engine on Neocodex servers.

The Sphinx Search Engine is an open source search engine which indexes database content (topics and posts in our case) and allows you to query them at a later time in a very efficient way. Invision Power Board, our forum software, is now using Sphinx in order to search through our topics and posts to find you the topic that you are looking for. This change allows our forum software to offload the task of finding the topics and posts in question to another process, allowing the forum to only serve you the content.

Invision Power Services have a pretty good tutorial on how to set up Sphinx for your server. Rather than me just reproduce their instructions here, you can read about how to do it on their site.