Hello

I did have a short chat with my host who said it's the caching that's the problem. Apparently it's not very efficient.

Likely. If I recall it correctly Alex indroduced caching since Geshi turned out to be very slow. It seems that you don’t use syntax highlighting in your forum. Maybe it’s worthwhile to have a look at some old code of mlf before caching was introduced.

Please bear in mind, that the hoster may talk about the caching of the webserver and not about the forums intern posting caching. That is technically a significant difference.

[…] ZBBlock […] -- it did seem to help reduce some load times but certainly not a complete cure.

Maybe. Give it a try. It’s not complicated to set up.

I can confirm that.

I think with sites like mine with a bit more traffic, you have to be concerned not only about the threat of spammers, but the fact that they are constantly looking for a place with vulnerabilities. ZBBlock puts a stop to that.

I have ZBBlock on my site monitoring registration, login, and the contact form since Nov 2012 – see here. I had ~32,000 blocks last year. The nice thing with ZBBlock is that once an IP is blocked (three attempts) only an HTTP 503 is returned. Traffic = 0.

Yes, the unnesessary traffic caused by spammers may be one reason for the bad answer time. They request one page after the other, sometimes for several hours, to post their spam at least one per minute. I had two of such attacks in 2013. With ZBBlock or a comparable software you can detect and dump most of these requests (without much work for the forum script) to /dev/null or HTTP 503.

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