[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by TECK

I read threads about people posting that they have one server powered by a Celeron processor and they run a "big" board. Ya, right.

lol... I wish.. Maybe with 30 second + page generation times.. If at all..

--------------- Added [DATE]1199311534[/DATE] at [TIME]1199311534[/TIME] ---------------

Adding hardward definitely isn't the end-all, be-all.. But, having good equipment definitely does help. Optimizing it is even more important.

Here is an example.. I used to have (3) Dual Xeon servers prior to my purchase of the single Quad Opteron, and the single Quad Opteron blew the doors off the three seperate servers hands down.

Both myself and another forum owner (we both at the time had well over a million posts and usually 1,000++ active members online with a 30 minute refresh) stuidies up and spoke to a lot of people (like Marco VH, Eva2000, etc) as well as other BB forum owners trying to find the right marriage.. We found it with fast hard drives, fair amount of RAM (8 gigs) and good processors.. ((btw,I know this has all been discussed in other threads))
I've got 3.2 million posts now, 132k members, and over 2,400 online at this moment...
I've also got a fair amount of hacks.. And I'm running a load of about 1.56 at the moment.. That also includes sever other forums. (The board stats mentioned above is running 3.5.4)

At least to me... That isn't too bad.. We'll see how it does once I upgrade that one to 3.6.8 status all hacked out.. Oh, and btw.. The other BB hosted on this server is running 3.7 with about 5 hacks..

I'm in no way saying vB isn't heavy on code and modifications out of the box, but I think a lot depends on what you are powering it with..

AWS, What is your PHP Memory Limit set at? I've had to bump mine up a few times to keep the search feature 'happy'.. I agree it definitely is hungry..

Lastly, I will NEVER EVER purge posts... I think it is the cardinal sin (well, one of them) of admin mistakes..

David

Originally Posted by AWS

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.