200 forums cause caching/performance problem?

[MJM]

I have read posts of problems resulting from having 1000X forums ...
I'd like to address this issue by working up from a lower number ...

What about 200 forums?

I currently have around 50 forums, relatively low volume site, minimalist approach to hacks and eyecandy, on a well balanced shared server, with plans on moving up eventually.
Everything seems to run well so far.
(3.54 > soon to be 3.6)
Should I anticipate any caching / performance issues by increasing this to 200?

Thanks!

PS Unsure which forum to post this in so posted in chitchat

[MGM]

Would have been better in this forum. But to answer your question, as far as I know, you shouldnt have much of a problem... Although it would more than likely slightly increase load times.

MGM out

[MJM]

Going live 3.6 tonight ... mods welcome to move thread.

"Although it would more than likely slightly increase load times."

... shudder ...

I'm wondering if now's the time to divide the forum into separate applications. In other words, making parent categories link to another forum.
I've been holding a spare lic which was intended for this use, but wanting a method whereas users with a single registration could access multiple forums.

If this was feasible I would purchase 2 additional lic which would provide us with 4 divisions.
I'd want to have these all on the same site.

Any suggestions appreciated as I'm trying to figure out now what's the best route to go for the future.

Thanks,
Mark

[MGM]

Well, why not just set the Depth of Forums - Forum Home in the vB Options to 1 or 0 (forget which) so that it only displays the categories? That way, people have to click on the category to see what the other forums are. It'll decrease the load times then if you were to have them all shown on 1 page.

MGM out

[Floris]

Yes, 200 forums might be a problem for some setups, but I think I have seen sites with 1500 forums and that's pushing it.

[MJM]

Is forum depth all that is required to reduce load times?

I would certainly not have them all on the index page, probably have a number that are hidden, ie, link on index page going to sticky thread in subforum containing list of subforum links going to specified hidden subforums.

[Dean C]

There are lots and lots of optimizations you could do to your source code to simplify the load-increase you can expect with so many forums too.

[Mike Anime]

also as few big gfx as possible if you have a large banner at the top make it small the same size or smaller than the default would also help.

[Carlos X]

If you use too much graphics with that much forums - its death for 56k'ers, you don't want to drive away the minorities.

[Dean C]

Graphics really have no-relevance. That's going to cut down on overall bandwidth but just because you have 200 forums with the on/off images, they are only loaded once.

[Mike Anime]

Graphics really have no-relevance. That's going to cut down on overall bandwidth but just because you have 200 forums with the on/off images, they are only loaded once.

this untrue for people on 56K i have and anime image site i had to limit the number of images on the pages for those 56K users. i should know i once had 56K even the best 56K modems only see about 53 to 54K max. most about 50K hell i notice a small difference between my cable modem and my brothers dsl modem on some sites and with downloads aswell.

[TruthElixirX]

this untrue for people on 56K i have and anime image site i had to limit the number of images on the pages for those 56K users. i should know i once had 56K even the best 56K modems only see about 53 to 54K max. most about 50K hell i notice a small difference between my cable modem and my brothers dsl modem on some sites and with downloads aswell.

This is true but that isn't the problem this guy is having. Loading images doesn't cause server load to go up.