Large VBs?

[1QuickSI]

I am sure this has been covered many times over but I do not frequent here that much so my appologies for the repedidness of the question.

Seeing as VB is the closest I can make a comparison to and not knowing much about your community I was wondering what a large VB would be considered? Amount of users, forums, etc. What are the size limitations if any?

TIA!

[Cary]

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...threadid=47430

There, they consider a vB "Huge" with more than one million posts

[BillaBongUSA]

There's a sticky thread in this forum that has a list of vBulletins that could be considered to be large. Maybe it could help you get an idea of how much a vB can handle?

[Edit: Dang, Cary beat me because my computer was being dumb!]

[1QuickSI]

Actualy it is not what VB perse can handle but rather how the MySQL database holds up under a larger message board.

Being the probily the largest UBB on the net and now driven by MySQL I have no benchmarks to judge by and think VB would be the closest to make a comparison against.

Thanx for the replies

[Wayne Luke]

Well I have over 14,000 members and almost 500,000 posts and I think my site is medium sized at the moment.

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by BillaBongUSA
There's a sticky thread in this forum that has a list of vBulletins that could be considered to be large. Maybe it could help you get an idea of how much a vB can handle?

[Edit: Dang, Cary beat me because my computer was being dumb!]

vB and mySQL could handle forums with a 100 million posts (there is a limit to the number of rows but I can't remember it off hand but it is huge). The problem with big boards comes the number of simlutaneous users - this is the limiting factor with any forum with a mySQL backend, not the size of the forum.

[1QuickSI]

Well then how about an open discussion on how to over come this.

My thoughts on making such a port to MySQL (besides being much faster) was having the ability to run a distributive architecture eventual splitting the system in to 2 servers. Application would reside on 1 and the database would be on the other.

Has anyone gotten to this point or thought about it?

[Dave#]

Has anyone gotten to this point or thought about it?

Hundreds of VB's run like this

[heretic]

that would be very difficult. I don't even really think it's been a problem, the best solution is just get a better server.

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by 1QuickSI
Well then how about an open discussion on how to over come this.

My thoughts on making such a port to MySQL (besides being much faster) was having the ability to run a distributive architecture eventual splitting the system in to 2 servers. Application would reside on 1 and the database would be on the other.

Has anyone gotten to this point or thought about it?

that is very easy to do, what is harder is to seperate mySQL over two servers. The idea would be to have "read" servers that are only used for SELECT * type queries and then any writes to the "main" server would then be filttered down to the read servers, possibly in batches. I am sure these are things that the mySQL team are considering especially as they try and get bigger and bigger corporate clients.

[1QuickSI]

Originally posted by heretic
that would be very difficult. I don't even really think it's been a problem, the best solution is just get a better server.

Throwing hardware at a solution is only a partial solution as one needs to look at the entire systems configuration as well.

I already run on a rather large dedicated server and do not think a bigger one would help. Server loads are very low but at the current growth I want to start thinking of what the next step would/should be.

Compaq DL380 w/twin 1ghz cpu's and 2gig RAM OS runs on first disk array comprised of 4 9.1gig SCSI3 10k rpm drives arranged in a RAID5 configuration with an online hot spare and redundent power supply.

Then a Compaq 5302 controller with 64mb cache connects to a Compaq U2 sub-chasis with 7 (has a capacity for 12) 18.2gig SCSI3 10k rpm again RAID5 with an online hot spare and redundent power supply. This is where UBB sits.

This all links via a gigabyte nic to a Nexland ISB Pro800 router on a SDSL line.

All connected to a APC 1400rm2u UPS.

Running RedHat 7.2 Profesional.

Look at the likes of large systems like EZBoard who must run on some sort of serve farm. I can't imagine splitting database quries to another server can be all that difficult. Or maybe it is just MySQL that is not at this level and one should look at PostgreSQL or another database solution?

Originally posted by Dave #
Hundreds of VB's run like this

Run a distributive hardware architecture? Are you sure? Are there any examples you can give as I would like to talk to them and get an idea of their board size, hardware, etc.

[chrispadfield]

I am surprised you are having any problems with that hardware. You seem to have about an average of 60 ish people online when I have checked ... perhaps some mySQL optimisation is needed?

Most of the forums listed in the Million + post threads probably are using dual servers. You pretty much need one when you hit around 400 people online at once using vb. Setting up a dual server config on vb takes 25 seconds, you just change the IP in the config.php file from localhost to the IP of the other server.

[MattR]

RAID 5 is (usually) not a good solution for an application which gets many writes, since as you know there is more I/O involved in a single write in RAID5 than say RAID 10.

[1QuickSI]

No there are no problems with the site or server loading at this time. I am just trying to speculate in to the future what might be neccessary. As for users online, normaly there are around 100 at any given time. Given the holiday usage was expected to go down.

I agree with RAID 5 but the the amount of data being written at any one time is really minimal and the caching controller really has helped in this area.

We have done some MySQL optimization as you can imagine converting a UBB was not small task. Each piece of code that needed to be re-written is customized to this particular appliaction and not for a mass market product. Our DB developer thinks he might be able to do some more tweaking but there is not much performance left to get out of it.

I am jelous that moving to a second server is as easy as you state. I am sure we will have much more work. But it has been well worth it as MySQL has had a dramatic improvement in the systems performace.

And one more thing...

Thank you to the people that have taken the time to respond. ti has given me some insight and I know now that I do have a bit of a ways to go before I reach any of this. I know we run 2 differnt platforms but bottom line is we do the same thing ultimatly

[chrispadfield]

It honestly does seem like you have gone through a lot of work, what i don't really understand is why not just use vb instead? i realise you have a few custom things like creating forums etc.. but abstracting the code form the admin area to do that would take about half an hour - less time i would imagine than rewriting UBB (shudders).