5 Forums or 1 "Mega Forum"?
 

I have 5 very active communities, but they overlap on about 25% of the discussion (and members) and am considering merging them into 1 community that is broken down into separate areas. This will essentially allow me to better promote 1 community, not to mention greatly reduce the various licensing costs associated with running 5 communities (already merged down from 15 communities).

Here's an overview:

Forum #1:
Threads: 171,239
Posts: 2,541,401
Members: 31,618

Forum #2:
Threads: 65,784
Posts: 915,407
Members: 36,283

Forum #3:
Threads: 92,426
Posts: 1,018,239
Members: 119,278

Forum #4:
Threads: 51,849
Posts: 766,501
Members: 16,088

Forum #5:
Threads: 1,938
Posts: 16,218
Members: 3,029

TOTAL
Threads: 383,236
Posts: 5,257,766
Members: 206,296

The questions is, how will this effect my load ... and it there anything I can do make migration of the forums easier on me? They're all running a 3.5.x vB build, and I'm hoping to ImpEx them into the latest 3.6 build when it's all said and done.

Also, would it be better for me to upgrade to 3.6 first, then migrate? or migrate then upgrade the mega forum to 3.6?

Initial run-throughs of the ImpEx process have timed out at various stages, and I've been tweaking the php.ini to ensure the least possible downtime.

Thanks!

Well, do all the forums hold different discussions? What's different between all of them? I'd say go with one mega forum if you'd like to, because that's what I'd do.

The topics are hobby gaming in nature ... but there's a lot of crossover. Two of the forums are Comic Book based; Three of them are card games; Two of them are miniature games ... and then there's our Misc. Area, which happens to be popular across all 5 communities.

I just wanted to know if vBulletin can handle the new "Mega Site" ... on 1 dedicated server:
Dell PowerEdge 840
2.4 GHz 1066FSB - Conroe \ Xeon 3060 (Dual Core)
146GB:SAS:10K RPM
4GB RAM

I don't have any experience running anything that large on one database ... and I going to overload the server are it queries tables that will now be 4x-5x larger?

I don't see why it would have any more issues than if it was all seperate forums. Infact the multiple different forums would be running 10x the quiries if it was on one. Say you have 13 quiries per user per index.php page load. If you have 10 users going to 5 different forums on it thats 650 quiries simultaneously. You could lower that significantly if they all just went to one site.

I would go with one large forum if the topics are similar..

Same thought :)

Is it better to upgrade them all to 3.6.* first, or impex them then upgrade? I have to do it in 2 stages (2 into 1, and 3 into 1 ... then those 2 into 1).

How would it work? I mean some users might have the same accounts on all boards, or some users might not find their account when you merge everything together (duplicate accounts)..?

We're merging everything into the largest community, in order of size ... so everyone in the largest community will get to keep their username. Everyone else will get bumped if there's a conflict. Joining accounts by email.

Still can't get it to merge properly though .. keeps timing out regardless of php.ini settings.

Isn't this an issue with member/post/thread ID's though? I've got a similar situation and I continue to read that it's hard to do this because of the above.