Server space? Performance?

[ryany]

I was wondering , can anyone (everyone=P) tell me how much server space does their forums take up?(approx.) State the approx. num of posts / users online and one time. And hacks?
I was wondering if i installed hacks like PM or Calender hack. How much more server space would it take up? What about the performance? Would it go down greatly? Thanks alot for you time.

[Martin]

my forum is about 300-400 Mb right now. I have 260k posts and allow full HTML, etc.
I have about 5000 members and have around 130-150 people on during peak hours, with a little less than 100 on most of the rest of the day.

As for the hacks, only the PM hack and the Poll hacks would add anything more that 2 or 3kbytes to your forum size. None of them seem to affect performance horribly.

[ryany]

300-400 megs ! holy ! thats alot.... my server has only 25megs.
You have a dedicated server at home? (if so. What kind of connection to the net have you got?)

Anyone else like to share?

[Martin]

I don't have a dedicated server at home. I have one leased. it is on a multiple backbone t3 network. I'm afraind, though, that it doesn't act so nice. The main backbone is Alter.net (~ble~)

Actually, with 250k posts at 300 Mb, it's STILL half the size of my UBB with 90k posts. Back in the beginning mine was one of the busier, bigger boards. A lot of new people have come on board since and now I guess i'm somehwere towards the middle.

Believe it or not, just starting out 25 Mb is plenty enough. The program itself is less than 200kb, and the tables for the databse only a few K more. It's when you start bulding a lot of traffic that you'll run out of space.

[ryany]

ouch. ok , I'll see how my board goes i guess. If the traffic becomes high , it'll just mean I'll have to cough out more cash for server space =(

thanks for your info ! =)

[werehere]

Hey Martin, I think you scared them! :p

[Martin]

ya think? it's not that bad. should I have told him it took me almost 5 months to get the 250k posts?

[ryany]

=) yeah. 5 months? That wasnt too long ... =P

[Martin]

well, i already had an established forum when I switched. I had a bad server crash (the fault if my ISP, not vB) and I lost the 150k posts it had taken me since the first of the year to develop.

when I started out, I felt good getting 100 posts a day. the first time we hit 100 posts in a day (not too terribly long ago) I was sporting wood for a week;)

[Joe]

Originally posted by Martin
when I started out, I felt good getting 100 posts a day. the first time we hit 100 posts in a day (not too terribly long ago) I was sporting wood for a week;)

Im still waiting for that to happen... uh, get 100 posts a day, that is.

[werehere]

Yeah Martin happens to have a very active forum for how many members he has, and how long it has been online. There are not too many forums with his member totals that is so busy!

So keep in mind that you will probably not have to worry about the database size for quite a while if you do not already have an established forum. Also keep in mind that vbulletin is one of the smallest kb wise because it uses a database structure instead of flat text files like most. :)

[ryany]

ahhh ok then . i wont worry too much about server space for now.... got a bigger problem . Can any of you solve it. Its over at this thread.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=5546

[FELLO9]

Martin I checked out your forums at @forums and they're really cool. I like the color combination, and also the poll hack, (which we're obviously gonna have in Vbulltin 2.0.). It's really nice!

[Martin]

the poll hack was courtesy of another user here, doron. you can find it in the hacks section. it's really easy to implement and yes, it will be standard in 2.0.0.

thanx for the compliments:)