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Scalability - Anyone running a large forum?

fairydustfairydust
edited February 2008 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I think vanilla is a great forum software I have being trying my hand at writing add-ons for it the last few months and I have to say that all of them took a lot less time than I expected; which for a programmer it is usually the opposite, plus I never coded in PHP before. I would love to use vanilla, however I am really worried about scalability, I think I have read all of the previous posts relating to scalability, performance, load balancing etc.... But does anyone know how it really performs. Is there anyone out there that has a forum with more than 1 million users that are using vanilla. It does not have to store millions of posts, I am quite happy to write an add-on to archive old posts (more than 30days old as they will not be relevant in my forum). I would be happy to have a dedicated server if good hardware will make a difference. Does it scale? Does it perform well with lots of concurrent users connected? I hope the answer is YES, otherwise I have to go back to the drawing board again and look at other open source forum software (that are difficult to extend and with bad interfaces :>)

Comments

  • fysicsluvrfysicsluvr New
    this one (lussumo) is probably one of the biggest vanilla forums out there. i may be wrong, though.....
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    Old threads:

    http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/5168/
    http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/5250/
    http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/3242/

    EMB is one of the biggest out there since last I looked. They recently had a scaling issue caused by heavy bot activity, which could also be approached by page (simpleCache extension) or database level caching (Livejournal made one that everybody uses, but the name just escapes me right now)

    Vanilla 2 is also rumored to support caching much better.

    The interfaces in Vanilla also make it easier to write custom caching add-ons, ones that apply directly to your needs so don't forget that!
  • SneakerXZSneakerXZ
    How is it looking with Vanilla 2?
  • The ToeThe Toe
    One of those threads above links to EMB (which currently shows 1371 threads, some of which I see have several thousand posts) and AMB (currently showing 9202 threads). Sorry I'm kinda new and don't know how to see the total post count.

    Is it conceivable that Vanilla could scale to millions of threads and billions of posts? (Assuming, of course, that the hardware scales with the growth.)

    Wikipedia's implementation of MediaWiki is of course a shining example of scalability. I am working on a start-up open source project which is looking for something which is at least that scalable (yes, it is ambitious), but which has the simplicity and flexibility of Vanilla.
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    Vanilla 2's development is all done by Mark, and it is probably still in its early design phases, but better caching/performance is a main goal.

    Toe: You have to view source to get a peek at what the CommentID is to see how many comments were made.

    AFAIK, EMB & AMB both imported a large number of threads from old software, whereas Mozilla's add-on discussions site started from scratch last year and already has 8k discussions and 18k comments.

    EMB also appears to have purged posts older than 2007. Don't know if this was for performance reasons or not.

    There are built-in settings for using database farms in Vanilla, and it appears MediaWiki's performance techniques (as listed on Wikipedia) would work well with Vanilla, with maybe the exception of Squid but that could just my misunderstanding of how Squid works.
This discussion has been closed.