Did I make a mistake? I thought most PHP implementations are optimized for web servers, which typically service many concurrent requests. Perl requires being launched as a separate process (I think) where PHP instances can be re-used from a pool.

Is this not the case?

I have no idea IkonBoard was about to release a version that supports databases. I looked at that admin panel and it looks very good. Kinda like a copy of ... vBulletin!!!!

I didn't mean to bash, objectively speaking the shipping version of ikonBoard is simply LESS than vBulletin in all ways I mean that is obvious by looking. I evaluated all of the available bulletin board solutions in terms of features and scalability.