Hey, I've been thinking of setting up an imageboard and was wondering how they stack up as far as server-side performance and what can be done to make them less stressful on cpu time (the only metric that really matters in preventing a shared host from taking you down).
Well, most imageboards are fairly lo-fi as far as cpu usage goes, since it's all static files that are being hosted unless you're posting an image, which is pretty uncommon in the grand scheme of things. (At least this is the case with most boards -- with say, 4chan /b/ around a GET, it's a whole different story, but the typical board is nothing near like that.)
Unless you've got some gigantic userbase clamoring for an imageboard, you're really not likely to get more than a couple posts an hour, and that certainly won't be enough to put a mark on the radar.
Most software in popular use (Wakaba, for example) use static HTML caches in lieu of dynamically built pages, which really lowers the workload tossed on your CPU. Since it's all cached (including threads, pages, and the index), the server isn't hitting the database and having to regenerate the requested page every time it's accessed (both of which really do hit the server hard). This works because old pages are pruned, so the workload involved in rebuilding all the caches in case of a change is smaller than the workload that'd be required to continually build all the pages on the fly.
To save space, you could always offload thread caches, thumbnails, and source images to different servers, but this is generally not needed. Like said above, running an imageboard (unless you're 4chan) usually doesn't beat up your server too much.
a note of warning: kareha uses static files, yes, but when viewing any custom postcount or spreads of threads, it calls kareha.pl -- so it uses more CPU than the others, especially if you have a very large number of threads.
I see. See, the reason I was asking is that, observing the Touhou board at pooshlmer, it really slows down every Comic Market and 503s start popping up. I don't have access to the stats (and the admin apparently never checks his email, so I probably never will), but the posting doesn't seem to pick up that much, so I figured it might be because there are more hits (which is the reason that everyone cites, though their source on this seems to be hear-say at this point) thus my concern about load. If it's not that, then what problem are they actually having and how does one prevent that when a small bump in traffic happens? My bad for assuming to much.
>>5
I think it has a lot more to do with the Touhou wiki which, until recently, was running on the same host. Mediawiki is a resource hog.