It's almost certain that you'll want to adjust Forums system settings from their defaults shortly after you're up and running. In particular, you'll want to keep an eye on caching, but there are other things you can do to ensure that the application is performing as well as possible.

Adjusting Caches

Adjusting cache settings is the best way to improve performance. Forums uses a set of caches to keep performance high by caching data so that pages can be rendered quickly without directly querying the database.

How Caches Work

How to Fine Tune Caches

Adjusting Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Settings

As with any Java-based web application, you can sometimes improve performance by assigning particular values to Java Virtual Machine options. You do this typically by editing the script that you use to start the application server. For example, for Apache Tomcat you can set the JAVA_OPTS value in the catalina.sh or catalina.bat file. While options can vary among VM distributions (not all servers use the HotSpot VM), most of the same options are available across VMs.

Here's a line from a Tomcat start script that shows example values for JVM options:

JAVA_OPTS="-server -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC 
    -XX:+UseParNewGC -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000 -XX:MaxPermSize=128m 
    -XX:+PrintGCDetails -Xloggc:/path/to/log/file"

Here are some of the JVM adjustments you might make:

For more on JVM options, see Java HotSpot VM Options or the documentation for the VM you're using.

Other Ways to Tune