Im a mod on a site that runs vB and has these types of numbers... Threads: 11,000 Posts: 2,500,000 Members: 19,000 Our peak users per day was at around 1600, and that was yesterday. The forums got sold about 6 months ago and the new owners are pushing for more and more new users and pretty much telling us not to ban people for posting like idiots, but want us to at the same time overpolice the site in terms of language, political correctness, dissent, anything remotely taboo (cant even say the word torrent), etc... They want to maximize profits obviously from the ad revenue generators, and therefore we have been flooded with kids that type "lIK Dis n lik dAt!!!!", and people with just zero brainpower. Sure thats normal and you always have a certain element of of it in your forums, but you try to limit it... its getting pretty horrid now. And since we arent allowed to ban people that much anymore, baiting and flaming is at an all time high. Most of the mods want to leave and start our own forum, we are confident we can bring with us a large contingent of the userbase. Not the majority of course, but a good enough amount. The site has been having massive problems and the site-op says that the equipment is top notch and that we just got way more ram that we could possibly need. He says that vB was just not built for this much traffic, but that he knows of some fixes that allow vB to be expanded. Im not sure what he mean.... but i do know that if our future site grows anywhere near those levels, i dont want to have the same issues. Site just stops working in the middle of the night, 4 in the morning, 3 in the morning, midday, evening, etc... (most think its spidering but the sytem-op disagrees) So my question is.... is vB even with its limitations, the best we can hope for? Or is one of the other options better adapted to scaling ?
The post/ thread count certainly shouldnt be an issue for vB itself, the daily figure for visitors doesnt mean much to be honest as it is the peak concurrent users that is more of an issue. As we use .Net we arent experts on vB but would assume as a commercial software it should be scalable to work on a server farm rather than just a single machine so it may be a case of needing to add a second server (I assume you already use a dedicated server, if you dont then this is the first thing to do) From .Net there is Community Server which is certainly able to cope with your volumes as I have seen sites using it with over 5,000 concurrent users and the response times were still reasonable - they have scaled to accept 50m page views per server per month with no limit to the number of servers that can be in the farm
Yeah i misspoke, the users per day number i mentioned was actually users at one time. We already use 2 dedicated windows IIS servers and experience signficant database errors, major slowdowns, the search IP feature in vB sometimes just kills the forum and sometimes you cant even get any results, it just hangs.
Could you send me the URL I would like to see the site because you might be able to fix vB so it doesn't screw you up that much. We are making a software that will work with this much traffic but it is not yet done.