How many forums can be created?

[rnmcd]

What is the limit to the number of forums that vBulletin can have? Somewhere I read that the limit is around 65,000, which I want to try to do--I know that is not a practical use for a board but I'm experimenting. That's why I have requested a method to link multiple vB boards with one user log-in, so if the board needs more forums I can have multiple boards for the "overflow".

Does adding non-postable subcategories then non-postable sub-subcategories then non-postable sub-sub-subcategories before getting to the forum cause considerably a great deal of 'load' on your server--I know that 'great deal' is subjective. The reason I ask is that I read something on the vB2 forum: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showp...05&postcount=2

So is there a number limit where although it might still run, there will be performance penalties? I can see where the forum jump dropdown will overload the page with html so I'll disable that.

Thanks.

[rnmcd]

{Can this be moved to vBulletin 3 'How Do I' Questions or somewhere that vBulletin developer might see it?}

Thanks.

[IDN]

The developers read the chit chat section.

[Mike Sullivan]

Theoretically, (since I believe we use an unsigned int to store them) 2^32.

Practically, I wouldn't go over a few thousand without making some modifications. Your forum cache will grow X[n] + Y*Z per forum, where:

• X[n] is size of the stored data for forum n
• Y is the size of a single record of forum permission data
• Z is the number of usergroups you have

Technically, that's actually only O(n), which is obviously the best you can get at having a cache of n forums, but I never liked Big-O notation.

I've seen forum caches over 1 MB, and that takes some time to load. You might be able to get around this a bit with shared memory, but I can't comment on that specifically.

(And yes, we would like to lessen the practical limitation.)

[rnmcd]

I think I understand the greater portion of Mike's post but nonetheless I have been sitting here reading it and doing the math....it's kinda just fascinating how there is so much that goes into vB behind the scenes to make it work and there isn't much effort on the user's end to post on the board.

Wow, again.

Thanks too.

[Erwin]

Why so many forums and subforums?

[IDN]

I think the most I have ever seen is 600+, which all of them are active.

[rnmcd]

Why so many forums and subforums?

One for each breed of domestic animal (house pet). I know that makes no sense but I figured I'd give it a try.

[merk]

You'd need a pretty huge forum to NEED that many forums for that kind of thing.

Being general would be wise in the beginning.

Why have more than one forum for ferrets?

[rnmcd]

You'd need a pretty huge forum to NEED that many forums for that kind of thing.

Being general would be wise in the beginning.

Why have more than one forum for ferrets?

I do believe that being general (or limiting) is great advice when starting out...actually its great advice throughout. But I'm just kinda planning for the future, and wondering at the same time--'what if' I wanted to expand to one forum for each breed of housepet...not saying that I definitely will.

But there are over 400 breeds of dogs, many breeds of cats, fish, and little sisters (wait she's not domesticated!).

I know this doesn't make sense but there's not much harm, I hope anyway, in giving it a try.

Ferrets might be in a forum called "pets that have bit me"

[rnmcd]

I read an article in Forbes or Time or Wall Street Journal that the site classmates.com has more than 200,00 messageboards (I think it was one for each school...I'm not sure if it was worldwide or not).


How do they manage something like that (load and performance wise)?

Thanks.

[Mike Sullivan]

A bigger database backend than MySQL (probably something like MS SQL or Oracle) and a more robust system than PHP (my guess would be that the message board runs as a daemon on the server, probably coded in something like Java).

Oh yeah, and a load of servers.