How many forum categories/subforums can vBulletin take?
 

Ok here is the idea;

We want to give our social groups the possibility to create a forum (SocialForums plugin). But besides that we want to also let the leader of the group create subforums in his or her forum.. Chances are that their will be several hundred, possibly thousands of groups who will use this feature and this will results in huge amount of forums and subforums. Now the big question;

1: How much does this impact our database?
2: Can vbulletin handle this?
3: if so, what kind of server would it take to handle this situation and can you give us any tips in how to handle this kind of traffic?

Thanks for any advice/input :D

1: Not very much
2: Yes
3: I would say you would need a lot of space, and I suggest some Mods incase it gets out of hand.

1. Yes
2. Anything over 1500 i hear is pushing the limits
3. Depends on how many users and the size of everything

Instead of using sub forums I recomend you use prefixe's.

What are prefixe's? Thanks for the reply's everyone.. we are starting to get somewhere.. Is there a way to modify vbulletin to allow more then 1500 forums? Maybe by setting up a database cluster or do we need to rewrite core functionality then?

Thanks again for the help!

The database is not the problem, memory and size of the datastore cache is.

And there is no way to avoid this problem? You can't expand the datastore cache any further? And does this problem still occur if you make the forums only visible for the people allowed to enter it ? So it will be like this:

50 open forums viewable to all.. 5000 private forums only viewable for the users permitted to enter them.. would this help?

Experience tells that around 1.500 is the maximum workable amount on most servers.

Look in the datastore table, and see what "forumcache" contains. ;)