VBulletin code customization and load

[RHSeeger]

I'm considering using VBulletin for a client and I was hoping to determine if it will be suitable for my needs. While there are a bunch of different things I need to be able to handle, there are two questions that would definitely help me to have answered:

1. The customer is worried about the load on the server and how it will scale. Assuming we host the server on Amazon, does anyone have any experience on how easy it is to setup and how well it will scale? There is an existing userbase of 20k+ users, but I don't have any information on the number of reads/posts per day at this time, so I'm hoping to get a general idea of the system's ability to scale on a single or multiple servers so I can discuss it with the client.

2. The desired system will have a single set of forums, but only display a subset of the messages in a given forum to a given user. My hope was to modify the source to include a field for each thread that can contain any number of different values. Then, when a user views the forum, they'll only see those threads that match the values for that field that they can see. The values they can see are determined at the time they're viewing the forum and only limit the threads that are visible (they can view any thread if they have a link to it). I was hoping to get feedback from someone familiar with the source code on how difficult they feel such a modification would be to implement.

Thanks in advance for any feedback provided.

[Trevor Hannant]

1. Setting up is afairly easy, we have various guides and videos here:

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/content.php?153-How-To-Install-Upgrade

As for scaling, we have a number of sites using vB4 that are larger. If you take Digitalpoint for an example, at the time of writing, it has over 2,000 users online with a most users online figure of 22,414. There are many others with the same sort of traffic figures also.

2. Regarding modifying the code, we can't offer support for this but we do have a dedicated modification community available to license owners at www.vbulletin.org wher you could get assistance with this.