Ways to increase speed and performance?

Cool. Thanks i'll check that out.

What I mean is, not refreshing the board until the user clicks the link to the board, or hits the refresh button. But if the user clicks into a thread, and then hits the "Back" button in FF or IE, it goes back to the board but doesn't refresh it. I think this might help a bit.

There are actually many ways one can improve performance without actually modifying the PunBB source-code, but some of my favourites are:

1. Drop Apache, and go for the much faster lighttpd with PHP running as fastcgi.
2. Ensure you're using MySQL's query cache. Although a forum by nature updates frequently, it should still prove to improve performance quite a bit in certain cases.
3. Install eaccelerator (the 0.9.5 rc1 was recently released, and works very well with the latest PHP versions). This *will* massively improve performance of PHP scripts, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone.
4. Be sure to enable gzip compression. This will result in much smaller pages being served to compatible clients (just about every single somewhat modern browser), which not only improves performance but will also result in a lot of saved bandwidth. Please note though that for this to work with lighttpd, you should enable it in your php.ini file instead of using something like the module for apache.

Hope this helps out

I can't say that I've encountered any problems under Linux so far, and I've been using it since beta2 was released. I had seen some problem on Windows in that PHP would occationally crash, but that has not happened for me on linux. In fact, it seems to be perfectly stable so far. The performance gain is quite amazing, so if you have the possibility to use it I'd say go for it Here's the settings I'm using, in case you should need them:

$ cat /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini | grep -i eaccelerator

extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/var/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="3600"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="3600"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

This will allocate 16MB of memory for the cache, use maximum compression & purge the cache ever 1 hour. These settings seems to work well for me, and I should think it would be the same for most people

* note that eaccelerator can be run as both a Zend module, and as a regular PHP extension. I'd recommend against running it as a Zend module though, as it seems to be running the fastest as an extension.

Is it easy for someone who is not familiar with manipulating php or database to activate MySQL's query cache and install eaccelerator.
I would like to do that but i don't know how ?

Regards

Untrue. There are several levels of compression you can set, using the highest uses a lot more CPU than the lowest without a whole lot more compression. Gzip is useful as long as you use one of the lower settings.

That's not what he said. He just said that the amount of CPU your server uses depends upon the level of compression you choose. If you choose a high level of compression, you will use a high level of CPU; if you choose a low level of compression, you will use a low level of CPU.