Extremely high volume forums?

[Grassy]

I know there have been a lot of questions asked as far as who has the busiest boards, etc. I searched the boards here and didn't find an answer so sorry if I missed this one.

I am joining a group of sites that are coming together and currently do about 10,000,000 daily page views and have had days where they have reached 24,000,000 and the majority was in the message boards.

In this new venture they are looking to buy a commercial product due to the time needed to come up with a proprietray solution that it would take. My question is has anyone seen any sites that do over 1,000,000 page views daily on a vBulletin board? I've seen Martin and Eva2000's boards and they have a high number of posts but I am unsure how long that took to reach and what their respective daily views may be.

In this new network they have a total of about 60 sites that make up this 10,000,000 daily page view mark and I think we'd have to have an instance of vBullein on each site but still in those 60 sites there are some that do well over 1,000,000 daily so we would need a message board solution that could handle it.

Has anyone seen one hold up to this? If so what type of hardware are we talking to do this? Thanks for any help.

[George L]

wow 1 - 10million pageviews/day

my vB only does between 45,000 - 75,000 pageviews/day and i believe a few vBs i have read about on this forum do up to 250,000 pageviews/day but 1 - 10 million/day

is this on 1 server or is it gonna be a group of servers ?

[Grassy]

Multiple I'm sure ...

I am not sure of the specifics but we have a very reputable tech team that has hosting but they have asked me about the message board software. The sites do 10,000,000 right now and once we come together it will only go up with the cross promotion and marketing going on.

As I mentioned some of these sites have over 1,000,000 page views daily and the vast majority is in their message board area. Unfortunately they are coming from a very robust in-house solution and are unfamiliar what an "off the shelf" product will support. We'd like to go with something that we are confident will last long term and not have to switch midstream. We know we can keep throwing hardware at the situation (UBB's response to our question) but we'd like to avoid having 60 servers running these sites. Can you show me a URL of the 250,000 pages view a day vBulletin?

[Fred]

Grassy, what type of sites are these? I'm starting a Network on sites too within the next month or so that will bring in around 5-6 million visit's daily.

[George L]

from memory i think

http://forums.bigbigsavings.com/index.php3 is the one

there's also a few other large vBs out there

like

http://forums.gameplay.com/

http://www.hardforum.com/

http://dvdtalk.com

http://www.flashkit.com/board/index.php

http://www.yes-its-free.com/vbbs/index.php

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/

http://forums.planetunreal.com/

http://wrestlingtalks.com/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/index.php

http://counter-strike.net

not sure how much www.winamp.com 's vB does http://forums.winamp.com/

and the out dated list at http://vbulletin.com/links.php

[Grassy]

This is a group of sports sites that is forming.

Thanks Eva, I'll look at those links and see what they do and maybe send an email to the webmaster for any comments. I appreciate it.

[Grassy]

One question ...

A lot of these high volume boards that you pointed out Eva are using a pre 2.0 version of vBulletin. Is 2.0 more resource intensive that they have avoided it or do you think it is a case of they are happy and there is no need to upgrade? I am not sure of the specifics of a 1.1.x version vs. 2.0 version?

[Hooper]

If it were me I think I'de just buy it and try it.

[Grassy]

Don't think we're going to do that ...

This is a major project and the last thing we want to do is try something and then if it does not work switch midstream. I am of the opinion we should gather all the data we can and then make a solid decision and be happy that it is the right one.

[Essam]

I think vb will support Oracle in the future. If so, I'm sure it can handle your project.

[tubedogg]

Re: One question ...

Originally posted by Grassy
A lot of these high volume boards that you pointed out Eva are using a pre 2.0 version of vBulletin. Is 2.0 more resource intensive that they have avoided it or do you think it is a case of they are happy and there is no need to upgrade? I am not sure of the specifics of a 1.1.x version vs. 2.0 version?

v2.0 has not been officially released yet, so that is probably a major factor. Once it is released as stable, you will probably see the majority of sites that still have access to the member's area move to that version.

[Hooper]

Originally posted by Essam
I think vb will support Oracle in the future. If so, I'm sure it can handle your project.

This is what I was thinking also. Oracle or Sybase would be more apt to handle this kind of traffic I would think. Software like vB as far as I know are dependant on the operating structure and hardware. I'm sure if vBull could handle 5-10 million hits or page views a day with the right backend and hardware. I don't know what MySQL would do though. Might throw rocks at you. (Could be wrong though. Never seen that many page views in a day.)

Here's a board with some major postage.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/

[Grassy]

This is a first ...

I've never seen anyone recommend UBB over vBulletin but here is an example:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htforum/announcement.php?forumid=20

[Mike Sullivan]

Actually, I've been working with a guy on that forum -- they're running into strange MySQL problems where queries that usually take .01 seconds would take 6+ seconds to run. Tables would lock in the "opening tables" part. Strange stuff.

Here's a larger forum that basically yawns at its traffic: http://www.disboards.com/forums/ With 451 users online in the last 15 minutes, the MySQL server's load is .23 and the PHP server's is 2.13 (with gzip on too I might add).

The only problem happened yesterday when Interland screwed up some of its routing.

[Hooper]

Ed's above post

Now that is darn impressive. That forum is hopping with traffic. There you go Grassy. 467 users on right now as I write this and max users of 600. I browsed through it and it was fast.

I'm impressed.
Thanks for the post Ed.