[DaveAK]

I posted a question over at vBulletin. I wanted to know what constitutes a big board anyway. Number of posts alone seems misleading to me. Here's what I asked.

Here's my situation. I run a board that has a little under 200 active members, (300 total), maybe 30 concurrent when it's busy, but in the 9 months it's been running it's already up over 400,000 posts. We run without safety nets, (no 30 seconds between posts, no minimum post length, etc.), and have a few add-ons like an arcade, FlashChat etc. Hitting 'New Posts' every 5 seconds is a particular favourite.

We're running on a dedicated server, that has a 2.6MHz Celeron processor and 512MB ram. Powerful stuff, huh? I'm planning on switching to an AMD Athlon 3200 with 1GB when the contract is up, to help with the performance, (which isn't bad as it stands - only ocassionally do we get a server load of above 0.8).

I'm trying to figure out where we rank in all this madness so that I can make my ill-informed decisions slightly more rationally! I checked out the Server Configuration forum and everyone seems to be talking about 1 million plus posts, thousands of users, 200 concurrent, and dual core/dual processor servers. I'm seeing a tenth of the membership of these boards, but half the posts already, in only 9 months - all this on a poxy Celeron!

So how do I figure out where we fit in, so that I can make sense of the threads on here? Small board? Big board? Busy board?

Please note that I am NOT asking for server optimiztion advice. I AM asking for a guide to where my board fits in in the scale of things so that I can make better sense of threads that I read, and can ask more informed questions if and when I need to.

Now as to this thread, if you made this a private forum, how would someone like me break into it? Who would determine if I was ready to make the grade?