My forums at http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com regularly hosts
upwards of 600 people (heading towards 700) during peak hours. I
find that if I don't prune inactive threads back beyond about
2.5 months that the database server moves as fast as molasses.
I'd like to be able to keep more threads active but I can't
under the current configuration.

At the moment I have a database server and a separate web server
(which also serves up advertisements). MySQL has been tuned for
the loads the forum puts on it.

I'm considering adding a second database server and slaving it
to the first server. The idea would be that all inserts and
updates would be done to the main server which would then mirror
them to the slave server. Selects would be done on either server
on a more or less random basis.'

This is a non-trivial change and I'm wondering if anyone here
has been down this (or an alternate viable path) already?

Chuck Weinstock

Forgive me asking, but wouldn't it be easier to just get a big mutha Dual Xeon with 2 gigs ram and a scsi drive? That should still do fine at 600-700. I'm peaking close to 500 and running a 1 gig system (dual xeon of course).

Also, if threaded/expanded mode isn't that important to your users then cutting this out will surely solve all your problems.

Conrad,

Thanks for the note. I am currently running Dual Athlon
2.33mhz with 2 gigs of Ram and a SCSI Raid array.
I believe the Athlon is equivalent to the Xeon.

Regarding threaded/expanded mode, I'm not sure exactly
what you are saying. Are you suggesting requiring the
threads to be shown in "flat" only or are you suggesting
the opposite?

My real problem is the number of posts that I want to
keep active. Currently we're at about 300,000 and things
work well, but if it gets to as high as 500,000 active
posts things slow to a crawl.

Chuck

Not sure how the Athlons work (definitely getting an Athlon 64 for my next home setup though...), but the Xeons seem to operate as 2 processors (each), probably like the Hyper-threading feature found in upper-tier Pentium processors. So a Dual Xeon actually shows up in WHM as having 4 processors.

To be honest my board was flying at 471 users, and I haven't even tuned MySQL yet (still waiting for help on this both here and at ubbcentral.com).

The only problems I've had were actually caused by threaded mode, and they even happened at off-peak times (4am, 1/10 of max number of users type of thing...). I'm currently trying to remove the threaded option as well as expanded mode completely from the system: I need to "surgically" remove threaded/expand options... help...!

In my case threaded-mode & expanded-view pose too much of a strain on server resources to warrant their use. I'm actually looking forward to seeing the option to switch off threaded mode in the CP when the new software is released in Spring.

As for the # of topics, feel free to give my forums a look to see if the numbers are anywhere close to what you're getting: http://www.mecz.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php . With the exception of 1-2 of the forums I don't prune anything at all.

I have several clients who use a mysql replication to load balance the load on several database servers. This is done by a small extension for ubb.threads and a replication of the ubb.threads database.

You can contact me if you want some more details about it.