Hardware and bandwidth

[billmi]

Are there any ball-park guidelines for the type of hardware and bandwidth requirements to expext for X number of users frequenting a vBulletin site?

One of the reasons I have been running a modified version of WWWBoard for years (with many modifications, including user registration, running multiple forums from one script, and a collision avoidance patch WWWBoard eats the board if 2 users post simultaneously) is that it only runs a script when it's posting - the rest of the time it's just displaying HTML, which puts minimal impact on server resources. While my main site is presently split on a pair of servers and pushing around a terabyte of traffic each month, forum use has really dropped off in the last couple of years, while vbulletin based forum sites on the same topics have really flourished.

I'm planning to switch to vBulliten, and set up a third server just for it - at the start, I'm not expecting bandwidth or CPU loading to be a real problem, but if it kicks up the way I expect it to, due to being associated with our main site, I don't want to be stuck having to upgrade servers every couple of months. I know I can minimize bandwidth loading through design of the pages, but what about CPU loading? What should I expect/be prepared for?

Thanks,
-Bill

[Wayne Luke]

Bandwidth and Hardware are hard things to judge for an individual site. One thing vBulletin uses to help with bandwidth is GZIP compression. This is built into the software so if your PHP installation is compiled to use it then you can cut your bandwidth down tremendously. Other ways to control it include monitoring avatar usage, images and other bandwidth intensive items.

It isn't the number of registered users that causes a problem with vBulletin but the number of concurrent users. If you look at the thread entitled Huge vBulletins - 1 million posts and greater (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47430), you will see that some of our customers have large forums just as you anticipate.

What will limit your forum depends on how you have your servers setup. Your servers will have to be configured for your needs. What tweaks you will have to take depends on your setup. You can visit our server configuration forum for more help in that regard. However if you use properly configured state of the art servers, you can expect to be able to handle 800-1000 concurrent users. Even with a user base of 30,000 this is in the realm of possibilities though your loads might be lower.