Dear Marco: forum caching problem

[RationalBeing]

Hi,

I want to create a forum wiht roughly 2000 subforums. However, i googled for forum software and found the following quote from marco:

Even though vBulletin supports "unlimited" forums, in real life more then 1.500-2.000 forums will put a too high pressure on the server (performance and memory). The real maximum depends on the server and the server configuration. As vBulletin 3.x will cache each forum in the datastore (and will load this information into memory on each page load), you would quickly run out of memory.

Some boards that use this many (sub)forums are still using vBulletin 2.x only because that version does not do forum caching and will preserve memory in cases like this. One of the things that will be focussed on when developing vBulletin 4 (there is no indication on a date for that) is the reduction of memory usage for large boards.

I'm interested in vbulletin, however I'm not sure, after reading this, vbulletin will work for me, with my need for 1500+ forums, on a server with dual 2ghz xeons and 2GB of ram. I fear that will be insufficient. Is it possible to disable this caching with 3.x. And if not, can 2.x still be purchased?

Thanks much

Or, after doing some googling, is it possible to move the forum cache, which would hog up my ram, to a hard drive based datafile that could be readable?

Please let me know.

Thanks

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by RationalBeing

Or, after doing some googling, is it possible to move the forum cache, which would hog up my ram, to a hard drive based datafile that could be readable?

I don't think so, I suspect you have simply read about moving the datastore to a file rather than the database. All that means is the forum cache will be loaded into memory from the file, but it's still in memory. There is no way to avoid that in 3.x

[RationalBeing]

Originally Posted by Paul M

I don't think so, I suspect you have simply read about moving the datastore to a file rather than the database. All that means is the forum cache will be loaded into memory from the file, but it's still in memory. There is no way to avoid that in 3.x

Paul, thanks for the speedy reply sir. I figured as much, after reading about the datastore. So basically, just to be sure, there is NO way to cut down the forum cache on a 1000+ subforums? I only say this because a friend told me each subforum is up to 10MB in ram, which would mean I'd have to have 10GB or something like that for 1000. Is there ANY solution to this in 3.x?

Is 2.x still available for sale?

[Paul M]

Your friend is seriously mis-informed, it's more like about 2K per forum.

As I said, there is no way to avoid it in 3.x

You can still download 2.3.x if you buy a licence.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Like Paul said, there is no way (well without rewriting half of vBulletin) to avoid this caching in vB 3.x.

Both Paul and your friend are somehow wrong on the memory usage per forum (or they could both be correct ). For each (sub)forum there is some information stored in the cache, you should think about things like Forum Name & Description (longer names/descriptions will use more memory), array of permissions for each usergroup (so more usergroups also mean more memory used), etc...

Next in this calculation is the number of online visitors and the number of pages they load. Each page will load another set of cached items in memory. So in the end it will be Cache Size * Number of Page Loads.

If you purchase vBuletin you will have access to all active versions, including the vBulletin 2.x versions. If you are starting a new board i would however try to avoid starting with an old version like vB 2.x at all costs. I would start by looking into alternatives for using that many forums. Using 2.000 forums is not only bad from a server perspective, but it will also very likely confuse the members and probably even prevent users from registering as they are overwhelmed with the number of forums.

exactly like in this thread:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=156733

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Originally Posted by nexialys

exactly like in this thread:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=156733

I think he knows that Nexialys, he even quoted from that thread.

see how i am a moron... lol

[RationalBeing]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

Like Paul said, there is no way (well without rewriting half of vBulletin) to avoid this caching in vB 3.x.

Both Paul and your friend are somehow wrong on the memory usage per forum (or they could both be correct ). For each (sub)forum there is some information stored in the cache, you should think about things like Forum Name & Description (longer names/descriptions will use more memory), array of permissions for each usergroup (so more usergroups also mean more memory used), etc...

Next in this calculation is the number of online visitors and the number of pages they load. Each page will load another set of cached items in memory. So in the end it will be Cache Size * Number of Page Loads.

If you purchase vBuletin you will have access to all active versions, including the vBulletin 2.x versions. If you are starting a new board i would however try to avoid starting with an old version like vB 2.x at all costs. I would start by looking into alternatives for using that many forums. Using 2.000 forums is not only bad from a server perspective, but it will also very likely confuse the members and probably even prevent users from registering as they are overwhelmed with the number of forums.

Well, I don't think there is really any way around it. But, is there any way you could calculate the theoretical max for this, assumign 1500 forums? I'm just wondering if upgrading my server's ram to 4GB would be enough or if it would need even more than that.

Also, someone mentioned "thread prefixes".. what does that entail?

thread prefix is a tag you can apply to any threads inside a specific forum, which will permit to identify them, select them per tag and even let you search across each tag depending on your needs.

expanding this would be like the Categories/Tags on a blog...