[alexi]

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.

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service