Seperate dynamic and static content to improve performance
 

Hi,

as the load of my webserver is growing a lot, I`m trying to move away from apache to a more performant webserver like lighttp.

Another way to increase performance might be to set up a seperate webserver to deliver all static content/assets. At the moment every image, CSS-file and HTML-Snippet is delivered by the main webserver that is over-dimensioned for this simple task. Wouldn`t it be a good idea if one could enter something like static.yourdomain.com in the vB configuration and e. g. an image would no longer be received from:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/image...allink_ltr.gif
but instead from
http://static.vbulletin.com/forum/im...allink_ltr.gif
?

Another point is caching. Of course there are a lot of dynamic parts in the different forum views but a lot of content is static or doesn`t have to be created dynamically with every page view. Is it possible to add some caching-mechanism for this kind of content? (maybe it`s already there and I didn`t notice it). Here is a podcast on caching:
http://castor.t3o.punkt.de/files/podkast_static.m4v

I think those performance issues are very important. If the forum becomes even more attractive with the new style (the new style might already help to improve performance) and vB still needs so many ressources, it will be difficult and expensive to keep the server able to meet the requirements.

all the best,
Sacha