Those should be fine...

in Settings -> Admin Control Panel Options -> Forum Manager Display are you set to "Single" ? You should be with that many forums.

There is no hard limit built into vbulletin just practical limits with php/memory/queries.

My few sites run on a server with a 3.2GHz Quad Core Xeon E3-1230 CPU on 32GB ram. I just tried to do what you're doing and I started noticing a serious decrease in performance around 2,500 empty top-level forums.

You could probably pull this off, but you'd have to have some serious hardware. If these are for different departments, could you split them up into different vbulletin installations altogether?

vBulletin ends up hitting hardware/software limitations. There are no imposed limitations to the vBulletin software. Designs issues however can keep the site from growing. To date you will have the largest known number of forums. I think our previous king was around 2000~ and even for them it was not pretty.

I would advise installing APC/xcache/etc and moving the vBulletin datastore into it.
Increase the php memory limit to 256, mysql max_packet_size should be fine.

Just for the idea of why it slows down/doesn't work well.

Each forum has to store a set of permissions for itself (global to that forum) and all of the usergroups permissions (8) by default on the forumhome load.

So 19,474 forums times 9 (sets of permissions) is a lot of data to store. This assumes you don't have custom uergroups outside of the default ones.

Its just a lot of data to process.

Zach,

Since he's running a private forum it's conceivable he will never need some usergroups like coppa, moderated, banned.. do you think any good would come from deleting unused groups?

Also, davio33, if this is on a server by itself, have you reconfigured MySQL with a "huge" configuration, such as copying /usr/share/mysql/my-huge.cnf to /etc/my.cnf to boost its performance?

Thank you for the replys.


Is there a way around this, so i guess maybe so it isnt checking permissions per forum?

You said "by defualt on the forumhome load" does this mean the permissions are asked only on forum home?

This is a good idea. I see were i can delete additional groups, but not the defualt groups. I really dont need, users awaiting confirmation/moderated users/ banned users...of course, without these groups, would the software still try to place these users

This is a little above me. my.cnf is looking good, but im not sure what you mean by copying it. I tryed googling it, but need more to go on. thanks for your input

Thank you, will increase limit and instal xchache

whoa! 7 years with vb and i never noticed that. Finally I dont have to wait for the forum manager to load...:)

There's a few different sample mySQL configuration files in /usr/share/mysql for different levels of performance. Pick one that suits you and use that one to boost performance.

Well, there is no easy way to disable permissions checking on the forumhome. I actually think a lot of hat data is loaded onto every pageview, since it is in the datastore and we keep that data available to every script in the software.

As an added i suggest you don't add a single add on or mod, turn off any guest permissions and the who's online, are you going to set that many usergroups for that many forums?

Also make sure you dont have two lots of gzip running, if its running on your server then you dont need it turned on in your forum, i had issues early days with my forum being slow to load or sometimes hanging and that was the culprit.

Try to use css wherever you can for your styling including turning that on in the vboptions. Any extra JS you use should load with the footer and any extra css files should load with the header, should help speed things up a little.

What a nightmare to set up and admin!

Interesting, I was once wondering if vBulletin is able to handle like 200 subforums, now I got the answer, it can handle even 20 000... wow, cool stuff.
Oh 20 000 forums and each for one department? And this all on only 2 GB ram machine? I would definitely look toward some more advanced solutions, clustering, grid, cloud.
BTW have you tried vbulletin 3.8 as well? It has much better performance than 4.0+ but it depends on what you need...