Creation of Unlimited Categories

sprockett

How robust is the vanilla database? I plan to modify it slightly to allow planned project management website to have 1 category per group. This may result in thousands (if not more) of categories. Would the schema be able to handle this? I was considering using PHPBB which does support unliimited forums, but i'd much rather vanilla. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Ben

I don't think there'd be any limit in the code, It'd just be whether your database could support it.

Minisweeper

There is no reason it wouldnt work with thousands of categories, though is it really necessary? If you had a few discussions per catagory you'd end up with an absolutely enormous forum.... not that there's a problem with that. And i'm sure mark would be very happy to hear some feedback on performance. But ben is right, there is nothing *stopping* you from doing that.

sprockett

thanks for the reply guys. I've taken a look at the schema, it looks like it'd hold up as long as things are indexed properly, but I was just wondering if anyone had any comments about it... By the way, slightly off topic, since there's no "subscription via email" feature, hwo do u guys know if there are new posts on the board? Do u like check back every 10 secs? :P

Minisweeper

When I'm at home i tend to refresh it every couple of minutes in the process of things... I'm at work now though so you're just lucky i dropped by :P Honestly though, if you are setting this up, give mark a shout first (i assume he wont mind me suggesting that). There are a couple of other guys round here who were setting up big forums (i dunno how big though - yours seems pretty high up the scale but i suppose 1000 categories + 5discussions each = 5k the same way 10 categories and a shitton of posts in each does) and mark did a bit of testing with them to add some indexes here and there to speed it all up for everyones benefit - speed testing on a big scale is (presumably) a lot easier because little differences will be more noticable than a rogue millisecond here and there.

sprockett

hi minisweeper. Yup.. scaling properly is a huge problem, and is often not thoroughly tested for lots of homebrew programs. Thats coz the slowdown is initially almost negligible, but gets exponentially slower as the DB's hit the ten thousands/hundred thousands rows. But most forums don't get THAT many posts, so slowdowns arent really expereinced. I was messing around with "SCUTTLE" an open source social bookmark manager (with tags), and tried testing it out with 100k links. It took 5 seconds for a page to load! It then took me another 2 months of free time to design a schema that scaled much better. But i guess thats also a problem inherent in any type of "social bookmarking app". This is because there are a lot of dynamic "SELECT COUNT(*)" queries that involve multiple joins over tables that could be as big as 1m if not 100k rows. This is due to stuff like "get related tags" type queries. I really marvel at how DELICIOUS manages to do it... OK enuff off topic stuff.. I love vanilla! Interface just gets more and more addictive.