UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Best way to integrate user table

We are trying to integrate the user table of our ubt forums with the user table of another aplication. We want users to be able to sign up for one and become members on both. Since our forums are very busy and the other aplication will be pretty search intensive, we are trying to come up with the best way to optimize server resources.

We originally planned to share the w3t_User table with both applications, but I am not sure this will be the best plan now. Any suggestions on the best way to integrate the user base of the two applications? The other application is custom written user connection database program.

One way to do it IMHO is to use the w3t_Users table as you mentioned and obtain the information from there. If your custom application is able to read the cookies that .threads sets then you will be able to login in both areas with one login. Now retrieving data from the w3t_Users table will be simple select queries which you would have done either way through the board.

When you are talking about the application being intensive you are talking about using the information stored in the w3t_Users table or in general in the other tables? In .threads the tables that get the most "hammering" are the w3t_Posts, w3t_Last and w3t_Online since they are constantly used when users browse and post the forum.

You can use the w3t_Users table either by having the tables of the custom application in the same database as .threads or you can have them in separate databases, provided that you give the second database user access to the w3t_Users table. That will be a better solution IMHO since MySQL will keep resources separate towards the two applications.

Finally you might be looking at replicated servers but I say that reluctantly since I don't know what you mean by "intensive"

I hope this helps

Thanks for the reply Nikos. I think we are going to have the applications share the w3t_Users table. When I said our forums were very busy, I mean we get about 140,000 or more page views per day on our forums. At least that seems busy to me but I know there are busier forums out there.

For sure your board is busy - no doubt about that - due to the page views you quoted.

I believe that you won't have a problem with the common use of the w3t_Users table from both applications

The best way to go about this is to create a test integration and ask from some of your most "trusted" users to become beta testers, testing the integration of application A while being in the forum at the same time. Once you get a feel as to what the load increase will be then you can forecast the expected loads when all users are integrated in this modification.

Some things to help monitoring will be the load on MySQL, which should be tweaked appropriately to cater for the additional load on the .threads database and it wouldn't hurt monitoring the resources that apache uses this test period. These statistics will give you the adequate information to see how you will proceed with this.