• From: Deutschland
  • Registered: 2004-12-12
  • Posts: 22

Topic: Silly question, but...100.000.000

Silly question, but... Can sustain the same loading as the biggest forums? With the same servers?

http://rankings.big-boards.com/
http://www.big-boards.com/statistics/

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/index.php
6019 users online 
Gaia has  250440420 articles posted, with 227172302 in storage
We have  1308999 registered users
Most users ever  online was 22683 on Wed Dec 22, 2004 7:32 pm

Hardware config
1 x Celeron 1.3 w/512k RAM, single HD
4 x P4 2.6Ghz w/2GB RAM, single HD
1 x Dual Xeon 2.6 w/4GG RAM, 4 80GB HD running as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays
1 x Dual Opteron 240 w/4GG RAM, 4 x 15,000RPM 16GB HD as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays from Raid Array controller, 1 80GB HD for OS

The dual Opteron setup is for the MYSQL server, while the dual Xeon is the main web server for the forums. Within the 4 smaller servers, one is used to serve static information such as graphics and avatars. The rest serves all the other pages like the art rating page, the character item stores, and the link list. The slowest machine is used strictly for displaying the non-vital graphics such as frame borders and forum buttons since the site is very graphic intensive.

  • Connorhd
  • Connorhd
  • Former PunBB Developer
  • Offline
  • From: Leeds, UK
  • Registered: 2004-06-13
  • Posts: 4,195

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

i would have thought if phpbb can do it then punbb can although you would have to change the online table from HEAP to MyISAM

are you actually thinking of switching to punbb?

FluxBB.
Connorhd.co.uk.

Connorhd's Website

  • From: 127.0.0.1
  • Registered: 2001-11-02
  • Posts: 9,167

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

In general I would say that in comparison to phpBB, PunBB should perform better under heavy load. I really don't have any number to support this theory though.

Sometime after new year, I'm gonna import this database into a PunBB forum and do some testing. The difficult thing is simulating real load. Sure, you can run apachebench and simulate lots of users requesting the same page over and over again, but it hardly reproduces what happens in real life.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Rickard's Website

  • Registered: 2004-10-28
  • Posts: 35

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

An easy way to test it would be to get it on the front page of slashdot. Then you would see what a real load would do to it.

Eddie

  • Connorhd
  • Connorhd
  • Former PunBB Developer
  • Offline
  • From: Leeds, UK
  • Registered: 2004-06-13
  • Posts: 4,195

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

yeh but how do you get there?

FluxBB.
Connorhd.co.uk.

Connorhd's Website

6 Reply by hcgtv

  • hcgtv
  • hcgtv
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: Charlotte, NC
  • Registered: 2004-06-25
  • Posts: 1,991

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

edduddiee wrote:

An easy way to test it would be to get it on the front page of slashdot.

That would be more of a DOS attack than anything else. Bandwidth and Apache would get saturated long before PunBB gets any requests.

For a true test, when such a board is setup, we can all coordinate a time to test it out. I have 3 computers that I can use to hammer the forum with.

PHPCrossRef . TXP Make . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . We Love TXP

hcgtv's Website

7 Reply by Sean

  • Sean
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Wisconsin, USA
  • Registered: 2004-12-30
  • Posts: 15

Re: Silly question, but...100.000.000

Actually, that website "Gaia Online," now runs on over 50 servers.

From my understanding, though, the phpbb software that Gaia runs on has been heavily changed and optimized. I've heard cases on many tech forums that say that a phpbb forum (original code - unoptimized) will slow down to a standstill if there is too much traffic. Something that IPB or vBulletin don't suffer from nearly as much. I think that's why vB is the board of choice for big businesses.

I'm very interested in seeing how punbb would compare to vB in terms of handling the pressure. From what I've gathered (I just found out about pun 3 days ago) from downloading and using this Punbb software, it is extremely efficient.