Is there a limit to the number of forums on a site?

[boozecrooze]

Hi.

Is there a limit to the number of forums on a particular site?

For example, let's say I have 10 specific categories, and then wanted the same categories for 50 different geographocal locations. That would come out to 500 forums. Would that be possible?

What would be the difficulties involved?
I would think that if this would be server intensive, if the site was to grow, would it be possible to split the geographical region sets into different servers?

Thanks!

[Zachery]

Its possible, but the more forums you have the bigger your datastore becomes. The realistlic limit on most servers is around 1000 total forums. How you are going to get people to post in 1000 differnt forums is beyond me :) Start small, work you're way big.

[boozecrooze]

Hi,

thanks for your reply.

So is it possible for the datastore to be too big? I can imagine the site becoming quite large but for now I guess its hypothetical (I'm definitely starting out small). But if I was to have say 1000 forums, would splitting them up across several servers alleviate any possible slowdowns, or are there other issues to consider?

Also, on another note, I can imagine the craziness in using the Admin CP to control 1000 forums. That would be nuts!! But as crazy as it may sound, I can see it getting to that point!

I really appreciate your help! Thanks!

[kmike]

The main problem isn't in the datastore size, but in that the whole list of forums is re-processed by many of the main forum scripts (forumdisplay.php, index.php and basically everywhere if forumjump is enabled). I think you can go up to a few thousands forums without any noticable impact if you have a powerful web frontend. Or you can cache the processed forum list (iforumcache) for some time but not for long as it contains some important info.

I can't see how you can split the forums across several servers if you want all of them displayed in one list.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Datastore size IS an issue. The whole datastore is loaded into memory for each pageload. Having too many forums, would increase the size of the datastore and (depending on server config/memory) could lead to swapping.

[boozecrooze]

I was definitely thinking that it would be an issue down the road. But would it get so big that it would cause the site to be unbearable, or are there any work-arounds to help with the datastore?

Thanks!

[kmike]

Of course it is an issue, but you'll bump into the problem I described in the post #4 much much sooner than the point at which the datastore size will start to affect the performance.

For reference, the datastore table file size for 400 forums is ~500KB.

[arindra]

this maybe a little offtopic , but
i have had the problems of forumjumps , in a different way ... i have a large gallery on another site , which has got over hundreds of categories , and 30K members .
in Admin CP there was a option of assigning a category / image to a user , and it would totally make the browser crash / hang when trying to generate a list of users .