Question SH404SEF

I have got sh404sef working on Kunena perfectly okay. However the forum was quite slow so I went into sh404sef and purged thousands of SEF URLs. This definitely seem to make quite a bit of difference with the speed of the forum. Do you think my actions were responsible for the forum speeding up? I don't really understand how this component works apart from giving you some nice URLs for the search engines to pick up. I was just a bit word that if I purged them, I would somehow upset everything on my forum.

This is known problem with sh404sef. In large forum Kunena has huge amount of different urls to be able to show all the messages and different pages. The problem with sh404sef is that it saves URL information to a large cache file (php), which can grow very large.

I assume it's okay to purge these URLs? It didn't seem to make any difference to the URLs on all the different posts.

Where did you get sh404sef for kunena? Does it need any plugin or just install sh404sef

I have had SH404SEF installed on the website for quite a while. If you go to joomla extensions, I think there is a link to where I got mine from, it wasn't the website called Artio, or something similar sounding. As for the plug-in, I got it from the link below and it works great

www.kunena.com/forum?func=view&catid=13&id=4020

For me sh404sef is kinda useless. Yes, i know that mnay of you will contradict me but the so called "search engine friendly url's" are in fact "user friendly url's" and in no case will help you rank higher in search engines. Google and any other search engine can index just fine any kind of url's. There are many other benefits of using a sef extension, unfortunately many don't understand the true purpose of it. sef url's help with security of your site, with duplicate content and so on. With all due respect for creators of sh404sef anyone can manually make some sef settings which will truly help, for example setting the right way h1, h2, h3 tags on your website. I'm not trying to say that sh404sef is completely useless but it's not complete either.

I think you are probably right, I think I'm correct in saying that Google do often change how they work and list websites. However when you've got several thousand links coming into your site, you want to make sure that when you upgrade software, all your URLs stay the same whether they make a difference on the search engines or not.

In fact I need to write a performance writeup on Kunena and SEF.

If you have more than 10,000 posts in your forum you should not turn on something like sh404SEF for the forum component. You can enable it for the rest of the site, but set it to skip for com_kunena.

I have been batteling performamnce and memory problems on my site for a while.

Finally got to upgrade to Kunena 1.0.8, CB1.2 and turned off sh404SEF for com_kunena.

The results are staggering:



The utilization chart is for the server that runs both www.starVmax.com as well as www.kunena.com two fairly high traffic forum sites with 150-200 post per day each, plus a couple minor web sites that I run on that server.

IN the past I had to delete the sh404SEF cache at least once a week to keep the performance of the site acceptable. The problem with a forum with more than 10,000 posts is that it will have more than 10,000 URLs very quickly. In my case my server would get up to 20-40k cached URLs within 10 days and would degrade all of the server severely.

You can run sh404SEF for everything except the forum pages. You can also map the homepage of the forum to something like www.mydomain.com/forum - just don't turn it of for the forum content if you have more than 10,000 posts.

And as was said earlier - it will not impact your google search standings at all.

Now you've got me thinking. I have got over 23,000 messages so maybe I should switch off sh404sef and see what kind of difference it makes to the speed of my forum. I've been looking in the configuration but it's a little bit daunting since I've only ever use the default settings. Could you please tell me how you switched off without messing everything up?

I see now, in "by component" you have a drop-down menu, just choose "Skip"?