Performance concerning categories

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Hi, I was wondering what impact having a large volume of categories might have on overall performance of vanilla forum and in what areas performance would degrade as category count balloons. My intent is to allow a private category to be automatically created for each user, and for overall topic count for each user to be 1,000+ with 10-100 posts in each topic. My goal is for user count to be in the 10,000s to possibly 100,000+ .

I'm not looking for more than a general guess since so many variables can come into play such as frequency of user activity etc, but I don't want to go down this road if it's likely to cause my database performance to significant degrade.

Kaspar

Could not find the post in which it is mentioned but VF is used by large companies with large forums.

Your hosting server might be bottleneck.

Kaspar

https://vanillaforums.com/en/showcase/

While having their own themes you will recognize Quicklinks and Popular tags here

https://community.f-secure.com/

VanilIcons and Who's Online here

https://community.acer.com/en/categories/e-m-series

Linc

If you make a "Flat" category (under Display As when creating a category) you should be able to put thousands of categories under it it.

There's a scaling bottleneck with the other, hierarchical category types because of data needing to "bubble up" from child categories that creates a lot of overhead. I wouldn't exceed ~200 non-Flat categories unless you have memcached and a lot of memory.

Flat categories was made for exactly your use case, I believe.