[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by AWS

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

Simple solution... Add more servers.. Hey, its just money, right?

I know most people use leased dedicated servers rather than buying their own servers and colo'ing them for their "big boards"; however, as vBulletin grows with features and what some call bloat, server performance is growing at a similar or faster pace.

It hasn't been 2 years since I purchased a Quad Opteron server with 6x 15K SAS drives running RAID 10 & 1 (I think, lol).. Back then that was a monster that people in the DC drooled over when I rolled it in and racked it up.. Now days you have Quad Core Chips and 15K SAS drives are more standard.. The price of the new servers with monster specs are less than when my quad opteron was back then and packs so much more processing power. My Quad Opteron still handles my primary Big-Board and a second one that has reached that "status" (according to B-B) and it still handles it quite well. I'm about to upgrade to 3.6.8 and add a bunch of hacks and new scripts etc.. Soon after that I will be adding a dedicated http server and making the existing opteron a dedicated database server..

I guess where I am going with this (loooong winded) is that as vBulletin grows, so does the level of performance with servers (across the board) that host it.. I was speaking about colo'd servers but when you compare leased dedicated servers from 3 years ago and today, you will see improvements for the same $$ as well..

And besides, if you really do have a "Big Board", you should be able to monitize it and afford the hosting that it requires..

Just my 2 cents of course..

David