Maximum NUmber of Forums

[captainron19]

Using V Bulletin V 3.5

Ok here is my situation - My forum is a nationwide message board system for firefighters. http://www.fire-forums.com In addition to having numerous specific forums for topics pertaining to emergency services, I also have forums specifying regions of the United States that lead to a forum for each state. The forum just recently went up and running

My plan was to have (under each state) a forum for each county to allow for specific conversations. I was going to add these over time as people requested them but i figured I would go ahead and add a little at a time.

If I choose to make a forum for each county under each state will this be too much as far as memory usage or anything of the sorts on my website? There are just a little over 3,000 counties in the united states. I would most likely turn off the function for the forum jump feature.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Paul M]

Your site will almost certainly die before you reach 3,000 due to the way forum information is cached.

[gavinzac]

yeah i dont think this is possible. in fact, i think its not even possible to have more than 255 forums/categories because the forum ID number is stored as a "short number".

[Paul M]

That's not true at all, the id is defined as smallint(5) unsigned, which allows 65535 in theory. :)

[gavinzac]

That's not true at all, the id is defined as smallint(5) unsigned, which allows 65535 in theory. :)
ah, sorry. saw someone else say that and assumed they ahd a clue what they were talking about :o

[Xenon]

hmm, i have heard that someone has got 10k forums before the forum went down...

as i posted into that thread, i suggest to use another system, like the thread prefixes, we use here for subforums of hack forums...

[Paul M]

hmm, i have heard that someone has got 10k forums before the forum went down...Well it would depend on your servers PHP Memory Limit - the bigger that is - the more it could cache.

[Xenon]

i still wouldn't do it ;)

[Erwin]

hmm, i have heard that someone has got 10k forums before the forum went down...

as i posted into that thread, i suggest to use another system, like the thread prefixes, we use here for subforums of hack forums...
10k of forums???!!!

[Paul M]

i still wouldn't do it ;)Well yes, neither would I - even if it worked, the performance would probably suck big time.

[kmike]

Each call of cache_ordered_forums() (used in lot of places, including forumdisplay and index) will be going through the whole list of forums, building $iforumcache, and then sorting it by the display order. So some caching is required to make it not suck for more than 1000 forums.

[woodysfj40]

right now you have 140 or so individual sections to post in
and 73 posts...

your site is new, granted, but hoping to generate posts in all those forums will take quite some time....IMO, it's WAY to specific...

right now, users will get bored trying to check even a few of those topics, and are very likely to leave before actually getting to one they have information on...

your forum traffic should drive your design, not the other way around...IMO...

[FlyBoy73]

I'm not sure exactly how many individual forums we have now but it is certainly over 500. The last time I updated forum information I think it went to 943 or something like that. Of course, we have discontinued and merged forums in the past but most still remain.

I discussed this with MarcoH64 in the past and he said we would not take much of a hit at all having a lot of forums - so we expanded greatly without any problems. With all the forums we have, lots (usually between 1,000-2,000) of members on at one time, and only currently using two dual xeon 2.0 servers (1 web, 1 data base) it has done ok when optimized properly. (I am moving to our new Opteron server(s) in the next week)

Our primary forum also deals with International, National and regional issues. We have forums for all 50 States, and under each there are probably at least 5 forums in most of them. Some have upward of 20++ sub-forums. Then we have categories, forums & sub-forums for other countries and regions. This all in addition to the non-regional forums & sub-forums. This all has expanded with time and demand but is key to getting down on the ground in the regions that we want and giving the people there their own areas that vary considerably from the needs and information in other states / regions / countries.

You should have little trouble creating as many sub-forums as you need, CaptainRon.