• Registered: 2008-01-11
  • Posts: 21

Topic: Database is getting huge - What to do & What to look out for.

Here are the current stats on one of my forums:

Rows: 7041265
Size: 282.57 MB
with about 1,500,000 pageviews a month

My forum is growing very fast and I'm a bit worried about what will start happening once it gets really big.  What's your experience and/or knowledge is of what happens on a server as the DB gets bigger and bigger. I've got questions like:

1) Is resource usage linear? Meaning that as the punBB DB increases by 10% then will resource usage (cpu, memory, etc.) go up proportionately? Or, will I hit a point where resource usage will grow exponentially?

2) In either case, are the only solutions to either dump data in the DB (old posts) or to upgrade the server?

3) Any other thoughts / ideas for a non-pro as to what to prepare for and how to prepare?

In short, I don't want to wake up one day and notice I hit a magic HUGE DB BARRIER and my forum performance drops of a cliff.

Any other big punbb forum owners out there willing to share their experiences?

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

www.OutSourcedMyLife.com
  • Registered: 2007-01-19
  • Posts: 24

Re: Database is getting huge - What to do & What to look out for.

280MB is not huge by any means. Furthermore, DB size does not normally affect resource usage; having more simultaneous users does.

  • Registered: 2008-01-11
  • Posts: 21

Re: Database is getting huge - What to do & What to look out for.

Thanks for the reply.   

So, are you saying that in theory if I have:

20 concurrent users on a 50 mb punBB DB it should perform the same as
20 concurrent users on a 500 mb punbb DB?

I really hope you are right?   Anybody else want to throw in their two cents?

www.OutSourcedMyLife.com
  • From: Leuven, Belgium
  • Registered: 2005-06-14
  • Posts: 2,653

Re: Database is getting huge - What to do & What to look out for.

Pretty much.

You might want to look in further optimising stuff like mods etc.
But the best way to see server load is in the Admin panel. If it's a dedicated server, you should be able to see MySQL's slow query log and resource usage too.