How many forums / sub-forums can vBulletin handle?

[FlyBoy73]

How many forums / sub-forums can vBulletin handle before real degradation starts to take place? I understand this is going to also depend heavily on what type of server(s) someone is using but I would like to understand fully how higher quantities of forums can affect performance, and if this goes up exponentially at higher numbers of them.

Please note that I am someone that does not like to have inactive and empty forums, however my Big-Board already has over 500 forums / sub-forums and we need to add a lot more. The reason for this is our forum has very regional information that is different based on locations. What used to be primarily top level forums (TLF - is that new? :) ) have or are being migrated to each State in the U.S., foreign countries and much more. Some Regional forums may need over 50++ sub-forums each as we continue to grow and traffic, content & members demand them.

Currently, our forums are running pretty well especially after moving to a Quad Opteron server with 15k RPM SAS Drives, 8 Gigs of RAM etc.. But, I really need to know for future planning and growth how adding more forums are going to affect us. I have about 70 on hold until I find this information out.

I'd appreciate if any of the vB coders / designers or anyone else with experience comment on this.

Thanks!
David

[Steve Machol]

There are too many variables to give a simple answer to this. The absolute most I have seen is 2483 forums on a very non-busy site. Realistically if your site is busy at all, you may start having issues once you are over 1000 forums. However that's only a guess.

[FlyBoy73]

Thanks Steve.

Here is another question that might help me understand. Every time a member or a guest goes to the forum home index or other areas, does the server have to build information from all the sub-forums? What takes place and how does the additional forums add load? Are there additional queries or?

Thanks
David

[Steve Machol]

That I don't know. Things like search and forumjump obviously are impacted by the number of forums though.

[Colin F]

As far as I know all the forums, as the forumcache, are loaded into memory on most scripts.