Hello,
everyone knows me in this forum because of my endless questions in the past. It has been now 2 years since i use 4images.
I can say, that my site is one of the biggest 4images sites i know, (2000-3000 unique users per day / 100.000 hits per day)
I have installed over 60 mods, most of them coded by IcEcReaM (payed mods, only for my site).
Id like to share my experience with 4images, for the new users or undecided ones. If you are planning to make a big site, with much users - don't use it. When i first started to use 4images everything was fine, until i had 20 user simultaneously browsing at mi site. On a dedicated server (Dual P4 3ghz % 1GB Ram) load was around 8-12 / memory around 60-90%. It was because of the way the code is written, to catch all categories on every click. So when you have about 3000 categories your site gets slow.
There were many other things. Why I'am writing this topic? Because i want to warn you. If you plan to go "big", you have to pay big. Using the script for a small community is ok, but don't think 4images can handle 150 simultaneous users and 10.000 categories.
I spend 1900$ for a complete rewrite of 4images in order to solve my problems. It isn't finished yet, but it works. 80% of the code is about to be rewritten, but with only 20-30% untill now i get those results (index.php)
Page generated in 2.584239 seconds with 33 queries, spending 1.147000 seconds doing MySQL queries and 1.437239 doing PHP things. GZIP compression enabled
@ 112 users browsing my site (89 members/23 guests) and 9453 categories
After the rewrite is complete it will be 10-15 times faster.
So folks, if you want to use 4images big, as a community portal, with all the mods and extras you have to rewrite you code - and it has to be done by an expert. 90% of the mods in this forum are written very bad, yes that includes mods from "known people". At least this is the opinion of the expert i hired to rewrite my 4images installation. He also showed me some security issues on a fresh 4images installation with all the bugfixes installed (nicky,v@no - pm me for more information).
Again, this topic is not against 4images. Its about people who consider to have a big site based on 4images.
Everyone feel free to send me a PM if you have the same problems i had or for information about the changes.
Georgi
BULGARIA
edit on 31/01/2007Well, this is my year graph - no comment
Yes, this is
after the changes i was talking about .
(average 2500 unique visits/100.000 hits per day)
On this first image you see a clear difference in the cpu average (green)
for November 2006 (before we make the changes) and January 2007 (after changes were made),
final steps are to get down the serverload (blue line).
(average 2500 unique visits/100.000 hits per day)
Picture above is the graph for January. You can clearly see the reduced cpu load (green),
even the average serverload (blue) is reduced by 20%.
At the end of February i hope we can reduce even this results by 40%, we'll see.
