Xenforo What's the size of your xenforo forum's database and do you have a database server?

On disk around 2.6GB for Xenforo and from MySQL stats by engine breakdown

Code (Text):

+--------+--------+---------+-----------+---------+------------+---------+
| engine | tables | rows    | data      | idx     | total_size | idxfrac |
+--------+--------+---------+-----------+---------+------------+---------+
| InnoDB |    280 | 1091816 | 1086.36MB | 84.28MB | 1170.64MB  |    0.08 |
| MyISAM |      3 | 1860    | 59.53MB   | 9.47MB  | 69.00MB    |    0.16 |
| MEMORY |      6 | 789     | 1.97MB    | 0.76MB  | 2.73MB     |    0.39 |
+--------+--------+---------+-----------+---------+------------+---------+

Only need to get a dedicated database server if

1. memory usage for MySQL outgrows current single server
2. MySQL concurrent connection loads outgrow a current single server <-- generally it's this one that decides
3. disk space usage for MySQL outgrows a current single server

And if you size your single server correctly, you won't outgrow it for a while so no need for a dedicated MySQL server.

One of my client's Xenforo forums runs on a single VPS server with 50GB on disk database with

Code (Text):

+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+
| engine | tables | rows     | data       | idx       | total_size | idxfrac |
+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+
| InnoDB |    209 | 31703843 | 12950.70MB | 2807.64MB | 15758.34MB |    0.22 |
| MyISAM |      5 | 53823    | 15.68MB    | 4.14MB    | 19.83MB    |    0.26 |
| MEMORY |      5 | 6954     | 5.99MB     | 4.25MB    | 10.24MB    |    0.71 |
+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+

Another client of mine with Xenforo on single dedicated server for web + MySQL with 53GB on disk database size with

Code (Text):

+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+
| engine | tables | rows     | data       | idx       | total_size | idxfrac |
+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+
| InnoDB |    273 | 86404054 | 28644.61MB | 7052.80MB | 35697.41MB |    0.25 |
| MyISAM |      7 | 18577211 | 617.29MB   | 541.22MB  | 1158.51MB  |    0.88 |
| MEMORY |      4 | 17465    | 19.97MB    | 6.85MB    | 26.82MB    |    0.34 |
+--------+--------+----------+------------+-----------+------------+---------+

 

+1 yeah you can only strive for eventual high availability with each step towards it costing more $$$ and more effort to accomplish. Though it's been a long standing strategy for scaling for performance, that the next step is to split web and MySQL database duties to separate servers.

If it's uptime, then cheapest way is to have some form of maintenance mode in place which can be done on server i.e. if MySQL is down serve a site unavailable message via Nginx i.e. Beta Branch - sitestatus maintenance mode or you can do same from upstream proxy like Cloudflare. For instance with my Cloudflare Worker based advanced full HTML page caching at Cloudflare CDN level, I also bake in a 503 maintenance mode so I can switch a Cloudflare proxied/cached site to a static HTML maintenance page served originless at Cloudflare Edge server if the origin server(s) are unavailable.

Much cheaper than scaling out high availability on multiple servers for the small downtime events - especially for a site like Centmin Mod which is on a lower budget. Only time scaling out and extra $$$ is justified is if cost of downtime outweighs the cost of scaling out i.e. adding/splitting servers.

 

That is also an important point for performance at least is to figure out where your bottleneck is first. If it's not MySQL, then splitting out to a dedicated MySQL server won't change anything.