Anyone with a large forum upgrade (test upgrade)?

[rudedog1968]

For those with larger forums say over 10k members, have you done a test upgrade and if so how did it go?

Also db size before and after the upgrade (I hope you did a backup )
Version upgrading from (would love to hear from 3.8x forum owners)
How about the theme conversion

[chris15440]

I highly doubt anyone is gonna be in this camp for a good while. Just being honest.

[Wayne Luke]

We've done several test upgrades of vBulletin.com... Sorry, they are not accessible to the public right now.

The first upgrade would have taken about a week to complete and another month to rebuild the search engine. Now the upgrader is down to less than 4 hours and then some time to rebuild the search engine afterwards. Any large site should probably use the CLI version of the upgrader.

The biggest step in upgrading is going from 4.2.0 to 5.0.0 Alpha 1. That is where most of the database changes are made.

Some of the Beta Testers have performed upgrades on moderately sized websites as well. We had a two week intensive period of testing upgrades with a bunch of nightly builds.

[sadiq6210]

The first upgrade would have taken about a week to complete and another month to rebuild the search engine.

[Yves R.]

When I made some of those vBulletin.com updates, it took me some hours to perform the upgrade (4 hours if I remember correctly). Now it's far less (less than an hour)

[rudedog1968]

Thanks guys

I think I've read the database has been changed from what we're use too. Is there in increase in the size or does that stay about the same.

[George L]

Thanks guys

I think I've read the database has been changed from what we're use too. Is there in increase in the size or does that stay about the same.

Definitely will be changes and it depends also on whether your mysql server has InnoDB storage engine enabled or not. If your server has InnoDB enabled, then on upgrade from vB4 to vB5, a select few vB5 mysql tables will convert to InnoDB for better performance but at the expense of greater server resource usage i.e. more memory and disk space consumed. You can also convert those tables back from InnoDB to normal MyISAM or disable InnoDB storage engine support BEFORE you begin the vB4 to vB5 upgrade process. This has been the same for vB3 to vB4 or vB4 upgrades in general as well. I wrote a personal blog post at http://vbtechsupport.com/675/ about that for vB4 and dealing with InnoDB tables.

As Wayne mentioned, for large sizes using CLI command line upgrade.php method might be faster via SSH telnet

basiclly go into your core/install directory and run upgrade.php file CLI command line

cd /var/www/html/vb5installdirectory/core/install
php -f upgrade.php

My personal advice for vB 3.8.x folks do the upgrade in 2 stages

stage 1.
step 1. Backup vB 3.8.x database and files/attachments
step 2. Upgrade vB 3.8.x to 4.2.0 PL2
step 3. Backup your database and files so you have a working vB 4.2.0 PL2 copy of your forums

stage 2.
step 1. Run vB 4.2.0 PL2 upgrade to vB5 via CLI command line via SSH telnet (similiar if not exact process as with vB4 http://vbtechsupport.com/836/)
step 2. Backup your vB5 database and files.

End result you should have 3 database backups for your forums at working vB 3.8, 4.2.0 PL2 and vB5 stages. You then are free to use whichever version you think is best for your needs.

Of course ALWAYS run test vB upgrades in a test staging environment or server BEFORE doing it on live production sites!

Oh and having optimised your server for better performance i.e. apache, php and mysql optimisations, will speed up upgrade time as well