/*======================================================================*\
|| #################################################################### ||
|| # vBExperience 3.8                                                 # ||
|| # ---------------------------------------------------------------- # ||
|| # Copyright 2006-2009 Marius Czyz. All Rights Reserved.           # ||
|| #################################################################### ||
\*======================================================================*/

This readme handles aspects of optimization of vBExperience espacially on big boards.

vBExperience has been tested on smaller and also on some bigger sites. I know from boards with many users running this mod smoothly. It mostly depends on the hardware.

Just for an example:
- "RaGEZONE - MMORPG Development Forums" is running vBExperience
- 370000 Threads, 3500000 Posts and 320000 Members (October 2008)
- Server: Dual Quad Xeon E5420 @ 2.50ghz w/ 8GB Ram
- http://forum.ragezone.com/xperience.php



Impact on performance
- vBExperience uses the "user" table to store it's informations, so no additional query is needed in postbit.
- Shop items and Awards are also beeing cached
- On the Memberprofile one additional query is used to gather the statistics.
- Every 10 minute a cron is running to recalculate stats for users that created a post since the last cron. Only stats of currently active users are recalculated
- Every night two crons are running to recalculate the posts per day that is needed for the activity factor and the awards. This counts for all users, regardless they are active or not.


Some usefull tips for optimization
- Set all not needed point providers to 0. Doing this, vBExperience does not even check if the required tables are available.
- Change the calculation cron from 10 minutes to a time where almost nobody is visiting the forum, e.g. at 2 AM.
- Enable the option "Only active users". This makes sure that only data of users which were online in the setting "Timeframe for Activity" are calculated.