[filburt1]

Originally Posted by Lord Chaos

Ok, if you have a fairly large forum with a user peak of 1000+ users. 1+ million posts, 300-500+ forums, 100+ usergroups, 10-20 styles and so on, what...

1. Hardware would be optimal?

2. Which Hardware is highest priority to have as fast and as much of as possible? (ie. RAM, Harddrive speed, etc.)

3. What hardware would ensure this forum would be able to expand even beyond this without any problems?

Please answer these questions with complete disregard to cost, it is irrelevant wether the suggestions costs 100 dollars, 10K dollars or 100K dollars, all that matters are that they are correct.

1. With the exception of hard drive space to store all the data, all statistics are irrelevant except for number of online users. For more than 1,000 users online at any time, you will need a powerful dedicated server. With vB3, you won't need one as powerful, but it will cost at least hundreds of dollars a month, possibly thousands.

2. Bandwidth is important as is hard drive speed. You should also have enough processing power such that the processor is not constantly maxed.

3. A good step would be to get a server with a multiprocessor capability but initially only one processor (if the option exists). Once you absolutely need it, you can add a second processor, more memory, upgrade the hard drive, etc. Memory upgrades are the most common, and at their prices, cheapest. SCSI hard drives are expensive as all hell in high capacities.