PM system..

[Light Fantastic]

I have a question concerning the impact of the pm system on my prospective board. I am upgrading and I currently have it turned on in phpBB, but I would like to inform the members what the upgrade will entail and this is the only thing I am unsure of.

I expect to have around 6,000 users online at peak time(s), and I was wondering if turning on the pm system for this new board might have an adverse effect on system resources/bandwidth etc. I know it will have some effect, but just how much should I expect? If it is too great I may turn it off, but it is a useful feature.

Thanks.

[Steve Machol]

I'm sure it will have some impact but I have no idea if it would have a substantial one in comparison to all the other forum activity. The only way to know for sure is to try it.

[nexialys]

the PM system have the exact same server heap peeks you can see when using the posting system in the forum itself... the data is cached for each member when they receive new pms, so there is not absolute browsing intensive retrieve if data, compared to phpBB that is always crawling the db to search for these infos.

if you open the PM system to your members, you will not have server intense overheaps, because it's the same as opening a new section of your forum that will be very occupied.. :)

[bairy]

How many PMs a member has (both unread and total) is stored in the user table and populated at the same time as all the other userinfo. In that sense there is a very very very tiny amount of processing goes into it.

In terms of reading PMs, I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit lighter than reading a thread or putting together the index page (smaller queries, smaller tables to read, less php processing to do) so it'll be very little compared to the rest of the board's activity.