Maximum NUmber of Forums
 

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.

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

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".

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

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...

Well it would depend on your servers PHP Memory Limit - the bigger that is - the more it could cache.

i still wouldn't do it ;)

10k of forums???!!!

Well yes, neither would I - even if it worked, the performance would probably suck big time.