What exactly is a big board?
 

Is there a specific definition that vbulletin.org uses for what exactly a big board is? Big-Boards.com says 500,000+ posts but I'm not sure if that is the standard definition.

We have about 5K members and 1.5mil posts and I don't really feel like we're a "big board", more medium sized when I compare our site to others that have 1,000+ concurrent users and 9MIL+ posts :D

<a href="http://www.big-boards.com/" target="_blank">http://www.big-boards.com/</a>

AH, come on Shazz, you did not even read her question... LOL

i suppose that a site with millions of posts are considered big... ;)

Yes, exaclty :)
Or are they called extra-big boards?

I saw a definition here somewhere that said a big-board (for the purposes of this forum) was a site that needed to deal with a bit more than a regular board had to - like has a couple of servers for the site, or has to use sphinx search, or has other issues that regular sites just don't have to deal with.

a "big board" is really a matter of opinion ;)
but as the OP said, big-boards considers a board with half a million post to be a "bb"

for the purposes of this forum, I think a big-board is simply a forum that is large enough that it requires special tweaking or considerations due to performance.

I would say guess that would be where a big-board has issues on a single dedicated server -- though i'm sure there are other considerations.

If you are on a VPS or shared account, besides the usual textbook recs, the next step is always going to be get a dedicated server. Once you outgrow that --- well then you have some special considerations to think of that aren't well documented from vbulletin itself. So you need this resource.

now, that's just from the technical standpoint. :)

arn

While we're on the topic of more than one server, can anyone tell me when it's usually time to utilize more than one server? I am a loooong way off from needing that type of solution, but I've always wondered at what point do you typically need to think about adding an additional server? Would it be several hundred concurrent users or would it be more like several thousand concurrents? And how exactly can you use two servers at once? You can't split up your forum between two different servers can you? :confused:

I am running (well doing tech. admin for) a board that each day has periods with over 2.000 concurrent users online. Still running it on a single machine (dedicated ofcourse), although it starts to hit the limits of a single machine. As i can still run it on a single machine, i consider it to be just a medium sized board.

I'm surprised you can run over 2000 concurrent users on a single machine. I guess you are running a relatively recent server. I feel like I had to move out of one server well before I hit 2000 concurrent users, but it was a few years ago I suppose, so older hardware.

I think the progression is typically:

1 server for php + mysql, but if you start running into problems you would split the services into one php server and one mysql server, and tend to bulk up the mysql server with faster hard drives, more ram.

From there, I think you can do a number of things, depending on your bottlenecks.

Add a PHP Cache
Move all static files/images off the php server
Move attachments to a separate server
Use something besides Apache
Split the PHP server into multiple php servers

arn