how wise is it to have a box strictly for forum board customers

is it better to separate them or to mix it up and spread the load?

Depending on how large you expect this venture to be, I'd suggest running two machines. A single processor front-end machine for web serving/mail/dns and a dual processor database machine (on the same VLAN). You're with Dinix so something like this is entirely possible :).

what about limiting them to certain forum board software

and which do you think performs better?

Originally posted by LaurenStephens
what about limiting them to certain forum board software

and which do you think performs better?

Depends.

You can have a phpbb site that has 100 custom hacks on it, with 3 concurrent users that take down the entire server.

Or

A <insert forum software name here> site that has 150 custom hacks on it, tons of concurrent users, and takes very little capacity.

So it's hard to judge with the metrics that you've provided.

hmmm, i think he is trying to tell me something...

ok, ive taken the first big step and bought the domain names!

the rest ought to be easy ;)

Who, me?

Or he?

Only way to find out is to make a go of it, I guess. If you're looking to do *big* forums, you can start with a single box (dual xeon, perhaps), and expand to a small cluster as you need it. Most don't need it.

Originally posted by LaurenStephens
what about limiting them to certain forum board software

and which do you think performs better?
For the last two years I have production tested almost all major forum platforms. The lightning-fast and the litest one with customizable registration fields is the IPB forum. Needs only mod_rewrite to be the perfect one.

why is everyone bashing PHPBB? there are some huge phpbb boards out there and they seem to perform ok

Originally posted by kyriakos
why is everyone bashing PHPBB? there are some huge phpbb boards out there and they seem to perform ok

No one is bashing phpBB.

Anyway, Laura, having experience with both phpBB and IPB, and also running one of the largest IPB boards in existance (noted by Matt - the head developer - in one of the posts on their forum) - I have to say that the only other forum software that could possibly handle such a load would be vBulletin. This is not to say you should not permit phpBB, of course you should, but highly doubt a very large phpBB will compare, efficiency-wise to IPB or vBulletin. I highly recommend you do NOT permit XMB or any flat-file forum software. Been there, punished two servers, will never do it again :p.

im going to assume that a lot of the users will want to use the free ones available via fantastico

phpbb is one of them, not sure what the other one is right off hand

I'd just go with IPB. phpBB is a nice forum and with decent amount of hacking I've seen pretty large ones, but IPB allows high volume forums out of the box.

Two servers, sure. One for mySQL, other purely for finetuned Apache (at least with keepalive and mod_gzip! :) ). Your front-end server can have like 40GB IDE disk while all SCSI disk I/O will be on mySQL.