Help me make a eplosive growth plan for my boards

[Umaro]

I run diablo3.com. Its a site dedicated to a game that has not even been announced. The only thing that is for sure, is IF that game is announced my best guess is that there will be over a thousand users online within hours, maybe less.

I was on a shared hosting account before and I decided to order a dedicated server just incase the game was announced I could handle the traffic.

I did some research and ended up getting a opteron 170, 2 gig ram, 36gig scsi. After reading a lot of specs I assumed that would easily handle 600+ online users.

My site managed to get on digg.com before and I had 290 online users at one point, my server load was nothing, like .15 so I assumed that I could handle a LOT more users. Yesterday I posted another article on digg, I woke up with 360 users online and some e-mails with sgl errors. The site peaked at around 394 users and a lot of page loads where coming up with mysql errors.

MySQL Error : Got error 12 from storage engine
Error Number : 1030

After reading, the error was pretty much saying (god please help me, this isnt a database server).

I'm going to do some server optimizations to try and help the problem but this is what I need help doing. What eactly should be more course of action if the game is announced. What should i disable and so on so my basic forum will still be up well i wait for a database server to be setup.

Also, can anyone direct me or suggest the best way to move to a database server with no down time?

So yeah, what would you be doing if your message board that normally gets 50 users online could at anytime jump to 1000+?.

[mccollin]

A single server should easily be able to handle the load you described. I have a 3 year old dual xenon and run more on it than my one big board, and it has 3 times that load on the forum most of the time. I would go to the vbulletin.com optimization forum and see what you find out. By the way, what has this got to do with programming?