Really large installations
 

I'm working on a system for a customer that requires forum functions. The problem is that their site is very large-- as in "over a million users" (although not all will be on the forums at the same time). Still, I think that just one of the customer's dual-Xeon servers won't be enough to handle all the forum traffic.

The customer is experienced with MySQL deployments, replication, etc. so the database side of things is not a problem. Is it possible to run multiple copies of vBulletin accessing a single database? This would not be a case of each vBulletin instance supporting different forums; it would just be an attempt to load-balance potentially large forum loads across multiple copies of the software.

As long as vBulletin uses transacted database writes where appropriate, I think it should work. But does anyone know for sure?

-- David Ramsey
Nanalytics Corp.

As far as I am aware you can point more than one copy of the software at the same database without any problems - I have done this with test copies more than once to try hacks, new versions etc on a live database. I believe you would need to buy multiple licences for each copy you run publically.

I dont think they would since its technically one site. I think vb can handle the load assuming you have the right hardware, but there are members with boards around teh size your looking at who could better answer. You may also want to post this at vbulletin.com

Some transient data like session stuff might get screwed up if there are multiple installations--for example, one minute you may be logged in, the next logged out, then magically logged back in. Technically, you need one license per set of vB files. However, given you (dramsey) seem to be describing a load balancing situation, it may be different in your case.