vBulletin capacity

[john2k]

I'm just looking to get an idea of the kind of website traffic vBulletin/PHP/MySQL can handle.

Are there any sites using vBulletin with 50,000+ members? 100,000+ members?

How about forums - are there any sites with 1,000+ forums? 5,000?

Are there any limits to how many members/forums/threads vBulletin can reasonably operate with?

I'd also be interested in learning what kind of hardware would be required to support a site with very high trafficed forums - with many members, forums & threads.

Thanks for any info.

- John

[JimF]

The busiest vB that I know of is BaseballBoards.com (http://www.baseballboards.com/boards/) - but I think there are others. They get about 1,000 posts per day, maybe more - and about a million or so p/v's per month. I'm sure Kevin is around here somewhere, or mrogish who hangs out in the hacks forum - they could tell you what their server is. Though I think they are finding that their load is too much for mysql, and are planning on hacking the vb scripts to work another db platform. That's all I know, and none of that is "gospel", just what I've overheard - err, overread.

I think vB could handle unlimited everything - I think it is more of a question of if MySQL can handle it or not. And even then I'm sure it could be tweaked and tuned to accomodate pretty much anything.

-jim

[Edited by JimF on 08-03-2000 at 02:55 AM]

[eva2000]

yeah i was wondering the same thing ? my vbulletin is small now, but given what has happened in 5 weeks only, i am thinking big :D

what about vbulletin on a dedicated server where there are other sites i host on it as well ? currently my vbulletin resides on my dedicated server with another 10 sites of mine.

[Mike Sullivan]

http://forums2.gameplay.com :D

[eva2000]

yeah i registered for gameplay as well :D ... boy, it takes a while to post a message :rolleyes:

[Martin]

the problem with gamep,ay is that they've grown so slarge what they really need is a compiled language, server-side forums program.

I don't think any reasonably priced, non-custom program would work for a board that large unless they were running at least a Dual 950 with a coupla gigs of RAM for their DB server. The number of posts there is insane.

As for the original question, you would need one helluva server (or group of servers) to run something like you're talking about. I have a Dual 600 PIII with 512Mb RAM and I get about 2000-2500 posts/day average and I seen to hold up fine. I don't know how far beyond that you could go without getting into some serious servers, like the quad systems that Sun is putting out.

[eva2000]

wow Martin that's one active forum you have there :D how much bandwidth do you consume with that many posts ?

[phumphries]

I think that the key to scalability with vB is to eventually split the mySQL server and Apache/PHP server out onto two boxes. My Intranet board is teeny tiny nothing compared to your sites, but I do have some experience with other RDMSes. :)

I imagine that John is already working on it, but a product like phpDB (http://phpdb.linuxave.net/) would be a pretty simple way to let users pick the back end appropriate to their size, performance and price points.

[eva2000]

so if i had 10 active sites and a active forum and had to split the mysql to another server, would it be easier moving the forum than the sites ? i suppose so right ?

[Martin]

Originally posted by eva2000
wow Martin that's one active forum you have there :D how much bandwidth do you consume with that many posts ?

about 2-3 Gb/day

[eva2000]

woah :eek: is your forum the only site on your server ? if you have other sites, what kind of traffic/bandwidth are you consuming ? sorry for all the questions, just want an idea of what a Dual P3 600 can handle :)

[phumphries]

What I meant is to just move the mySQL server, with your forum database(s), however many, to a dedicated server. You have to tell vBulletin where to find the server, since it will not be localhost any more, but the effect is to move some of the processing and I/O load off your web server and onto a dedicated mySQL database server. If your forums are incredibly large, you could have a web server for your site, a web server dedicated to running the PHP part of vBulletin and a mySQL database server for each forum, if you needed it.

[Martin]

Originally posted by eva2000
wow Martin that's one active forum you have there :D how much bandwidth do you consume with that many posts ?

Right now it's the only site on the server, but I'm working on something else that is based in vBulletin but will be hardly recognizable as such:)
It should have 5-10 times the traffic I currently have within a year if I can promote it correctly. I'm working on "strategic partnerships" to help offset the cost of that part, though, and to help pay for a dedicated mySQL server to handle the back-end.
I'm hoping to be able to afford one of the high-end Sun servers to handle the mySQL, otherwise I might have to figger out how to port everything over to Oracle for a sturdier back-end.

[eva2000]

sounds very interesting martin what you're working on :) so is it possible to have a database for each forum ? so if you had a vbulletin with 10 forums you could have 1 database for the vbulletin, and 10 databases on 10 separate servers ? wow that's what i call scalability :eek:

[Martin]

well, a lot of what I'm doing is originating from hacks posted here, a lot from my own thinking.

When I'm thru I will release here what hacks could be used in a lot of places, but theres a lot that would be specialized to the site itself. If there were enough interest I would probably release a lot of the other stuff, too.