vBulletin Manual - The vBulletin Datastore

To improve performance, vBulletin caches certain information which isn't updated often in the datastore, so that it doesn't have to be rebuilt every time it's needed.

Examples for this are

forumcache - A serialized array with all the forums along with their options and permissions
options - A serialized array with all the information set in the vBulletin Options
profilefield - A serialized array of all the profile fields and their options.

The datastore data is stored in the datastore database table by default, but certain settings in the config.php file allow this to be saved in other places, to improve performance:


 // ****** DATASTORE CACHE CONFIGURATION *****

 // Here you can configure different methods for caching datastore items.    

 // vB_Datastore_Filecache  - for using a cache file

 // $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Filecache';    

 // vB_Datastore_Memcached - for using a Memcache server    

 // It is also necessary to specify the hostname or IP address and the port the server is listening on

 // $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Memcached';

 // $config['Misc']['memcacheserver'] = '127.0.0.1';

 // $config['Misc']['memcacheport'] = '11211';

At the time of writing (version 3.6.4) two options were available:

vB_Datastore_Filecache
This option saves the datastore data in the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file. Reading from the filesystem is generally less load-intensive than querying the database.

To use this option, you'll need to make sure that the /includes/datastore/datastore_cache.php file is writable and readable by PHP. Usually this is chmod 777. Then, uncomment the following line in the config.php file.


// $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Filecache';

vB_Datastore_Memcached
This option saves the datastore data on a memcached server. This is a fast memory caching system which can also be run on a different server to reduce load on the main server.

To use this option, a memcached server has to be set up first. Additionally, two config variables, $config['Misc']['memcacheserver'] and $config['Misc']['memcacheport'], have to be set up with the IP/Servername and Port respectively. All three lines need to be uncommented.


 // $config['Datastore']['class'] = 'vB_Datastore_Memcached';

 // $config['Misc']['memcacheserver'] = '127.0.0.1';

 // $config['Misc']['memcacheport'] = '11211';