vBB 2 and 3 Hardware needs

[Lord Chaos]

Ok, if you have a fairly large forum with a user peak of 1000+ users. 1+ million posts, 300-500+ forums, 100+ usergroups, 10-20 styles and so on, what...

1. Hardware would be optimal?

2. Which Hardware is highest priority to have as fast and as much of as possible? (ie. RAM, Harddrive speed, etc.)

3. What hardware would ensure this forum would be able to expand even beyond this without any problems?

Please answer these questions with complete disregard to cost, it is irrelevant wether the suggestions costs 100 dollars, 10K dollars or 100K dollars, all that matters are that they are correct.

[filburt1]

Ok, if you have a fairly large forum with a user peak of 1000+ users. 1+ million posts, 300-500+ forums, 100+ usergroups, 10-20 styles and so on, what...

1. Hardware would be optimal?

2. Which Hardware is highest priority to have as fast and as much of as possible? (ie. RAM, Harddrive speed, etc.)

3. What hardware would ensure this forum would be able to expand even beyond this without any problems?

Please answer these questions with complete disregard to cost, it is irrelevant wether the suggestions costs 100 dollars, 10K dollars or 100K dollars, all that matters are that they are correct.
1. With the exception of hard drive space to store all the data, all statistics are irrelevant except for number of online users. For more than 1,000 users online at any time, you will need a powerful dedicated server. With vB3, you won't need one as powerful, but it will cost at least hundreds of dollars a month, possibly thousands.

2. Bandwidth is important as is hard drive speed. You should also have enough processing power such that the processor is not constantly maxed.

3. A good step would be to get a server with a multiprocessor capability but initially only one processor (if the option exists). Once you absolutely need it, you can add a second processor, more memory, upgrade the hard drive, etc. Memory upgrades are the most common, and at their prices, cheapest. SCSI hard drives are expensive as all hell in high capacities.

[Lord Chaos]

Thanks for the info, the other info is more for load for searches and things, as far as I know about vBB searching 10 posts is still considerably less ressource consuming than searching 1 million.

How powerful dedicated server are we talking about?, how much memory, what about harddrive?, SCSI/IDE/RAID? What kind of processor is good and how much can one handle if dedicated to nearly nothing but the forum.

I neglected to mention that ontop of cost being irrelevant, bandwith is also avaliable...unless the forum plans to exceed the capacity of a 1 Gb connection....which would exceed the NIC anyway.

[eva2000]

Ok, if you have a fairly large forum with a user peak of 1000+ users. 1+ million posts, 300-500+ forums, 100+ usergroups, 10-20 styles and so on, what...

1. Hardware would be optimal?

2. Which Hardware is highest priority to have as fast and as much of as possible? (ie. RAM, Harddrive speed, etc.)

3. What hardware would ensure this forum would be able to expand even beyond this without any problems?

Please answer these questions with complete disregard to cost, it is irrelevant wether the suggestions costs 100 dollars, 10K dollars or 100K dollars, all that matters are that they are correct.
regardless of cost, such a forum size would need more than 1 dedicated server to run you're looking at 1 web server and 1 mysql database server

if cost is no issue a 2 server setup would be:
-------------
web server

Dual 3.0GHZ Xeon 533FSB 512K L2 cache
4GB PC2100 REG ECC DDRAM
4x 74GB SCSI 15,000RPM HDD in raid 1+0 using an SCSI RAID Controller with onboard cache ram 64-128MB cache
-------------
database server

Dual 3.0GHZ Xeon 533FSB 1MB L2 cache
4 - 8GB PC2100 REG ECC DDRAM
4x 74GB SCSI 15,000RPM HDD in raid 1+0 using an SCSI RAID Controller with onboard cache ram 64-128MB cache
-------------
1. connected together privately with Gigabit network card supporting Jumbo frames
2. probably running RH Enterprise Linux variety
3. in order of priority it's , fast and lots of ram especially if 1 server does web and mysql, fast scsi hdds, cpu power

[Lord Chaos]

Thank you, this is the kind of info I was looking for. :)

[eva2000]

oh and definite need to run latest mysql 4.0.x which right now is 4.0.17 and have an tweaked my.cnf mysql settings... if your mysql database server has 8GB of fast memory you can allocate alot of memory to the mysql buffers and speed things up alot :)

[Lord Chaos]

btw...why 4 drives?

[filburt1]

btw...why 4 drives?
RAID for speed and failsafe redundancy, I'd imagine.

[eva2000]

btw...why 4 drives?
raid 1+0 needs 4 drives - 2 drives are raid 1 and then striped raid 0

you end up with 1/2 the drive space so 4x 74GB scsi drives in raid 1+0 gives you 148GB of ususable space

raid 1+0 allows up to 2 drives to fail from the system from each raid 1 array and still allow the system to run... while you replace the 1or2 drives