with let's say 100 concurrent users using php-accelerator?

Brand IBM
CPU 1 GHz Pentium III
RAM 512 MB 133 MHz SDRAM ECC
Hard Drive 18.2GB Ultra 160 SCSI Hard Drive

please advice, I want to add it but if it means that I have to pay more for a bigger server I might have to think 2X

thanks

it should work without a problem. however try to upgrade to 1gb ram if u can. it will greatly improve mysql performance.

i think your server is able to support 200 online with vb

It should run fairly well as vBulletin is designed to run well with many users

Concurrrent users will hit it rather hard. But I reckon 100 shouldn't be an issue. You may want to take note that php accelerator caches frequently served files. In a forum, where the pages are always changing, it may even lead to a deteoration of the performance.

sprintserve makes a good point. Caching works great on static files - the server pretty much just pulls what it's seem before. Forums are very dynamic creatures however and reading from cache can prove more time consuming than just raunning things 'raw'

Greg Moore

i do not agree with sprintserve and akashik.

programs such as PHPA cache the PHP scripts, not their database content. this is completely different from the browser cache, proxy server cache etc. the pages change all the time but the scripts dont. the real data of the forum are pulled from the mysql server on the fly.

i use a program called turck MM

http://www.turcksoft.com/en/e_mmc.htm

which is similar to PHPA but the site claims a faster performance and after my personal tests it did seem 2b a bit faster. it comes with a script that shows the current stats of all cached scripts in real time. and when i take a look into it, a cached script ONLY reloads when the script is modified. my site is dynamic and the contents are updated via a mysql database several times a day. but the index.php file has only one reload after 1045340 hits.

the idea is, scripts like php, cgi etc can not make themselves stay in memory after they are executed. everytime a script is called it has 2b picked up from the hard drive. php accelerators keep these scripts in memory and optimize/organize them so that they can be executed as fast as possible when they are requested.

Your server is fine for Vbulletin and 100 users. I'm no Vbulletin expert, but if you tune for performance, I'm sure you could support 5 - 20+ times that.

Hi,
I agree with John[H4Y] your system should handle vbulletin with more that 100 concurent users with no problems at all.

Originally posted by John[H4Y]
Your server is fine for Vbulletin and 100 users. I'm no Vbulletin expert, but if you tune for performance, I'm sure you could support 5 - 20+ times that.

well i find it hard to believe a p3 ig can support 500-2000 users well with vb. unless all these people are "dead" sitting there and staring at the screen. :D

this forum, WHT, has like 500-700 concurrent users but last time i heard its hosted on 4 xeons with 2 being database servers.

vb is a very good forum and is more than enough for most "busy" needs. but its not really designed for very high traffic (1000+ users) sites at all.

Originally posted by qm8309
well i find it hard to believe a p3 ig can support 500-2000 users well with vb. unless all these people are "dead" sitting there and staring at the screen. :D

this forum, WHT, has like 500-700 concurrent users but last time i heard its hosted on 4 xeons with 2 being database servers.

vb is a very good forum and is more than enough for most "busy" needs. but its not really designed for very high traffic (1000+ users) sites at all.

PIII non Celerons are pretty fast machines (maybe not compared to bleeding edge CPUs, but still) and you'd be surprised what can be done with a little tuning and a nice linux OS with barely any overhead. Forums aren't the most CPU intensive applications, even if they are database driven. RAM and a fast HD help a lot. Some of our servers have a lot of sites with forums. I wouldn't doubt there are 100 - 200 concurrent connections altogther at peak on any server, PLUS a bunch of other stuff happening - even on our Celerons. Our load average rarely rises above 0.5 on these servers.
Dedicate the whole machine to Vbulletin and you'd be surprised what it could handle. And 4 xeons is overkill for WHT, but hey, Headsurfer can afford it. If Vbulletin isn't made for high traffic sites, what forums do you recommend? Vbulletin is easily the most popular forums software for high traffic sites by far.

The last time our forum hit 100 users (or around 95 I think it was), I checked server load and it was still well below 1.00. It's a dedicated server though P4 2.0ghz with 1.5 stick of ram. Vbull rocks. :)

john h4y:

this has been discussed in this forum before. if u do a search u'll find it. when it comes to forum, the US is not busy at all. portal sites like yahoo.com do not even have a forum. i dont know wuts ur concept of a high traffic forum. maybe 800 online is a pretty big number for u eh? but have u seen chinese forums with 5000-30000 people online?

"Vbulletin is easily the most popular forums software for high traffic sites by far."
this is easily true in US again becuz there are not that many forums and forum users at all.

if we r talking about anywhere from 0-500 vb is just fine. its a long established product and very mature. however when it goes beyond that get ready to pay for the hardware. if u ask me which boards are designed for real high traffic, i can name a few but lots of them are not available in english. however one of them does have the english version..

http://www.fastboard.org

its php+mysql. a even better one is http://www.discuz.net but sorry its in chinese.

as u mite have already known php and mysql themsevles have their own limitations. so there are other products such as C++ written boards with MSSQL backended as well.

but since we do not run such high traffic boards. lets go back to topics say we talk about forums with 100-500 users. now we have people with very limited hardware. mayb shared accounts too. wut happens if a product like fastboard is used? it will drastically decrease the resources used and improve speed. 100 users for fastboard/discuz is like a breeze.

True, MySQL is slow and any compiled language will be much snappier.

In my opinion you should be fine with those server specs.

Originally posted by NexDog
The last time our forum hit 100 users (or around 95 I think it was), I checked server load and it was still well below 1.00. It's a dedicated server though P4 2.0ghz with 1.5 stick of ram. Vbull rocks. :)

yes the 100 user forum runs just fine on the p4 2g with 1.5g ram. but i have tested discuz on my xp2100 w/ 1g ram and guess wut. at 116 members online memory usage was around 120mb and server load never exceeded 0.30. average page's mysql queries was 5 and process time was 0.007ms. yet it does have almost all the features vb does. (including PM, smilies, avatars, ranks,signatures,attachments,special codes and all)

That box should be able to handle 100 easily. Having an SCSI hard disk is going to be an advantage when it comes to the database. IBM also makes great servers.

vBulletin isn't designed for large forums?? I can't think of anything else anyone would run for a large forum. vBulletin just blows the crap out of anything else.... I can't wait for 3.x it looks great!

I agree that VBulletin is about the best for large busy forums. In the Lounge there is a thread with a lot of large forums listed. They were all VBulletin. I've also seen Discuz and that is pretty impressive forum software. I havent seen specs as low as qm8309 is talking about though. The initial page views were at 7 queries and the execution time was .054ms. Still it was a pretty impressive, that is if you can read Chinese...;)

Well I can read Chinese... and just look at the site. It does loads pretty quick. I will add it to my list :) But it cost almost as much as VB (US$100).

Originally posted by Watcher_TVI
I agree that VBulletin is about the best for large busy forums. In the Lounge there is a thread with a lot of large forums listed. They were all VBulletin. I've also seen Discuz and that is pretty impressive forum software. I havent seen specs as low as qm8309 is talking about though. The initial page views were at 7 queries and the execution time was .054ms. Still it was a pretty impressive, that is if you can read Chinese...;)

the discuz u saw was prolly 1.03 which has 7 queries. as i said discuz 2.0 (commercial version) has as little as 4 queries without any hack on. its also possible that the one u saw was a 2.0 loaded with bunch of hacks which is many people like to do.

to show u an example look here

http://yaoyuan.com/bbs2

the forum is not used. but u can see the process time below. refresh it.

again the term "busy" is relative. can u show me a 1000 user onine forum running vb on a single server? i believe its gonna b very hard to find one if its possible at all. but there are tons of chinese sites running fastboards and discuz with 1000-9000 users online on a singe server (not even dual xeon) and speed was still acceptable.

Here are several forums, all running different software all very *busy*...

IGN boards (http://boards.ign.com/users_online.asp)

Anandtech Forums (http://forums.anandtech.com/)

Overgrow (http://www.overgrow.com/edge/index.php?s=) (VBulletin, 1800 online as of this post)

HardForum (http://www.hardforums.com/) (VBulletin 2,000,000+ posts)

Automotive Forums (http://www.automotiveforums.com/vbulletin/index.php?) (VBulletin)

VBulletin's 1,000,000 post and higher club (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=47430&highlight=largest+forum)

There are a few out there I'd say....

yes but nowhere says they are running on one server rite?
think about the speed u r getting on dis forum, wht, which is hosted on 4 dual xeons. and imagine wut happens if u put everything on a single p4 2.4. boom.

just think about it this way: vb has like anywhere from 15-20 mysql queries on every page. fastboard has 6-7 and discuz 2.0 has only 4-6. the database query is the single most important factor that affects the performance. there is no comparison.

I wasn't trying to compare forum software, I was trying to reassure the thread starter that he will probably be fine with his hardware set up. This thread was about the ability of his hardware to handle a VBulletin with 100 concurrent users.

You can always start another thread for forum software comparisons...:)

its cool. actually the thread went offtopic somewhere already. as of the poster's situation. its been confirmed by everyone that its gonna be okay. it was just one guy stated that with that p3 ig 1gram setup vb could hold "5-20 times" of 100 which is 500-2000 users. it was defintely misleading.