How many forum categories/subforums can vBulletin take?

[Bowromir]

Ok here is the idea;

We want to give our social groups the possibility to create a forum (SocialForums plugin). But besides that we want to also let the leader of the group create subforums in his or her forum.. Chances are that their will be several hundred, possibly thousands of groups who will use this feature and this will results in huge amount of forums and subforums. Now the big question;

1: How much does this impact our database?
2: Can vbulletin handle this?
3: if so, what kind of server would it take to handle this situation and can you give us any tips in how to handle this kind of traffic?

Thanks for any advice/input :D

[iBardia]

1: Not very much
2: Yes
3: I would say you would need a lot of space, and I suggest some Mods incase it gets out of hand.

[AHealthForum]

1. Yes
2. Anything over 1500 i hear is pushing the limits
3. Depends on how many users and the size of everything

[Dismounted]

Using more then 1.500 forums/categories (and with a "normal" amount of usergroups) won't work on most servers.

The only possible solution would be to use vB2, which is probably not what you want.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=208429

[ssslippy]

Instead of using sub forums I recomend you use prefixe's.

[Bowromir]

What are prefixe's? Thanks for the reply's everyone.. we are starting to get somewhere.. Is there a way to modify vbulletin to allow more then 1500 forums? Maybe by setting up a database cluster or do we need to rewrite core functionality then?

Thanks again for the help!

[Marco van Herwaarden]

The database is not the problem, memory and size of the datastore cache is.

[Bowromir]

The database is not the problem, memory and size of the datastore cache is.

And there is no way to avoid this problem? You can't expand the datastore cache any further? And does this problem still occur if you make the forums only visible for the people allowed to enter it ? So it will be like this:

50 open forums viewable to all.. 5000 private forums only viewable for the users permitted to enter them.. would this help?

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Experience tells that around 1.500 is the maximum workable amount on most servers.

[Dismounted]

And there is no way to avoid this problem? You can't expand the datastore cache any further? And does this problem still occur if you make the forums only visible for the people allowed to enter it ? So it will be like this:

50 open forums viewable to all.. 5000 private forums only viewable for the users permitted to enter them.. would this help?
Look in the datastore table, and see what "forumcache" contains. ;)

[game-screen]

i suggest a good server with alot of ram, quick HDD and a good processor. If you talk about a few thousand people, webspace wont/cant handle it.
You will probably need a server which is only for the Database.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

i suggest a good server with alot of ram, quick HDD and a good processor. If you talk about a few thousand people, webspace wont/cant handle it.
You will probably need a server which is only for the Database.
Would you care to elaborate how you come to this suggestion?

[game-screen]

Easy... 5000 members and lets say you got 1500 online. If he is hosting other things, like a gallery or website which uses mysql it will slow down everything. vb is using the Database for everything, that means always being connected with the Database. 1500 users will cause alot of traffic and processing power. Having a server just for the DB, will speed up the ´thing alot for a simple reason:

Most hosters = if you have 2 servers at their network, both servers will be connected with a 1gbps connection. You will still have the 100Mbit connection at your website server, but the processing between script and database will be much quicker. Your website server will just give you the result of the MySQL server processing, and almost nothing will be slowed down. If you host everyting on one server, you will have massive lag.
But: If you have a forum with lets say 620.000 members and arround 50.000 members online you can use it on one server, but you will need at least a QuadCore (better use 2x Quad), 8 or 16GB Ram and SCSI hdds with 15.000 UPM. And 100MBit wont handle it. a 1Gbps connection is a must be for this.

But i just have read the thread again, and one server is enough for that. I thought he ment 5000 users online at same time.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

The number of users online is not a real issue here. It is the amount of forums that leads to problems.