I'm trying to get as many different perspectives as possible about hosting large vBulletins (10,000+ members, 1 mil + posts).

I've heard so many things from "AMD's are way better than P4" to "AMD's burn out quick, stick with Intel" and "Celeron is better than P4 for forums..." etc

Can you guys (who actually have experience hosting large forums) give some first-hand accounts with each processor... how much RAM made a difference, the best set-ups, etc. etc.

Thank you,
- Justice

In our experience with quite a few clients the best server platform for vbulletin would be the below

PIII 1Ghz dual ready system if not dual
512 Ram starting
9GB SCSI HD or higher depending on how much storage you have.

Our clients running vbulletin and other heavy mysql systems have had alot of success running this type of setup.

thanks for the reply... have you had bad experiences with vBulletin on AMD, P4, or Celeron processors?

AMD's run to hot in my opinion and arn't good yet for server platforms. Celerons are waste of time for any heavy processing. The p4's i think your budget can afford really arn't for heavy procesing either. The best route would be a PIII 1Ghz or higher going dual when needed. You will get much better performance out of it.

Originally posted by Justice
thanks for the reply... have you had bad experiences with vBulletin on AMD, P4, or Celeron processors?

I can't really explain "why" at the moment (not experienced enough) but I can tell what's NOT working for us.... I run TutorialForums.com - currently about 6000 members, max online so far about 85 on an AMD Duron 1GHz, 512MB RAM, 20GB 5400RPM IDE drive.... and when it hits that max members, we run into some serious problems.... max_connections is set at 600 ... currently I've been having to restart MySQL weekly, as the process gets bigger and bigger - right now at 95000, each instance using 6.1% of memory. There are a few other big sites on the server - but they are primarily static. Load averages are to both extreme ends at random times - havent figured out why yet. We host with Rackshack at the moment, and haven't got much help (of course). Considering a new server - possibly with fastservers.net or at least a much more powerful server from RS.

I think definately a SCSI drive or at least an "excellent" IDE is important, and as much RAM as you can get. The main thing that matters is how many concurrent users, not how many members or posts you actually have total. I'm looking forward to the attachment purging function in the upcoming vBulletin 3 - it should reduce my database size by several hundred MB.

Peace.

could you give me a reason why dual amd athlon 1800 mp would not be better?

in response to the cpu temprature, though athlon CPU is marginally hotter than p3, but that is only one small factor. Other factors including cost and speed.

In my opinion, an appropriately cooled-AMD will perform to its specification, just as P3 will do to its. That means dual amd will be much more powerful than p3 at less cost.

Your main problem right there is your DURON, running to hot and not enough power. Any IDE is NOT ideal for heavy database simply because it cannot handle RPMS has nothing to do with it. If you want performance you want PIII going upto dual ready with SCSI. Basically that is what it comes down to.

check this (http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/chipsets/amd/760MP/17.GIF) benchmark at anadtech.

a dual athlon mp will perform best, if you have a big mysql database.

anandtech.com and their huge forums are now also on dual athlon mp server

wow, so many informative responses...

NORRITT, anandtech's forums (and the site I believe) use cold fusion. Doesn't that have some extreme differences between MySQL/php scripts?

justice, i do not know, but there is a whole review on the anandtech servers at anandtech.com. use the search form over there!

i just remember, that the forums and the site are mysql backended, as well as vbulletin. they use the dual mp server just for handling the huge forum mysql database. and as the chart shows the athlons are in fact performing very well. there were some more mysql benchmarks in the review as far as I can remember.

give them a search, it is a few month ago as I have read their article

here the 22 sites big article:
http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1483&p=13

and here a pretty new MP vs. Xeon article:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1606&p=1

more about the new anandtech server:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1604&p=1

Originally posted by jayglate
In our experience with quite a few clients the best server platform for vbulletin would be the below

PIII 1Ghz dual ready system if not dual
512 Ram starting
9GB SCSI HD or higher depending on how much storage you have.

Our clients running vbulletin and other heavy mysql systems have had alot of success running this type of setup.

For a database system I would not pick the 1Ghz P3 but the ones that come with 512kb cache (1.13, 1.26 and 1.4ghz). They are only a little more expensive than the 1Ghz version but perform much better during heavy IO load due to their larger cache.

Frankly, I have to say that I don't trust AMD for any server-related things either. They get much hotter than Intel CPUs which can cause a lot of troubles like server crashes when the server is constantly under heavy load.

pentium has done me good amd has'nt so my vote would go for pentium anything other than celeron ;) so p3 or p4

best of luck let us know what you go with

I have to admit I would feel happier with a P3 when it's mission critical... Intel have got the experience over AMD on this score which makes me feel a lot safer.

Having run a couple 10k member forums for clients (gotta love government and educational clients), it doesn't matter what platform you go with on the inside the box as much as the box itself. At this point AMD and Intel are basically the same as far as performance.

What you need to worry about most is RAM and HD speed. Fast RAM and lots of it will make all the difference in the world. The largest forums site I hosted was on a site for a .edu with just under 11k members. It ran fine on a dual 500Mhz system, but going from 2GB to 3GB of RAM made a huge difference in performance.

It also helps to have the right OS under it. Since vBulletin is all PHP and MySQL go with FreeBSD. You'll get a very stable platform with an OS that can handle a proper load on it.

hmmm, this is the first I'm hearing of an OS difference.

Can you give me more details on what you mean by harddrive speed?

For basics on harddrives and how they work 101's read storage reviews reference section:

http://storagereview.com/guide/guide_index.html

Basic idea of HD speed is how many RPMs the drive does, but that's not the only thing you need to worry about. Average seek time, how much cache is on the controller, things like that.

Take a look at these two drives, one from IBM and the other from Seagate.

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/ultra/ul36z15.htm

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,242,00.html

These two drives, at first glance are all but identical. Just over 18GB in space, both 15,000RPMs. The biggest different is the average seek time. The IBM has a 3.4ms average seek time while the Seagate has a 3.9 average seek time. In terms of performance, the IBM should and most likely will beat out the Seagate.

Now, I admit these are pretty high end drives, but for what you are doing (10k+ members, million plus posts) these are what I recommend to any client getting anywhere near that.

But, it comes down to research. Read the specs, check out sites the review hardware, and compair everything.

Wow, everybody freaking out over AMD's :)

I run three Dual AMD MP 2000 systems all scsi, two with raid and one with just a 36gb scsi and ide.

Here's a few "Do's and Don'ts" for running AMD Chips

1) Do not use a 1u case
2) Do not use the factory heatsink/fan
3) Do not let the intake temp of the case get above 74F

Use the expensive high CFM heatsink fans for the amds
make sure you've got 70+ cfm worth of fans to push air throu the case and of course make sure your in a decently cool datacenter.

If you do those three simple things you won't have a problem.

Also, the default RH kernel does *not* like dual AMD's, and will crash due to the eth on tyan boards, but of course it leaves no errors. You need to compile 2.4.19 by scratch and you shouldn't have any problems.

You *could* put dual amd's in a 1u case IF

1) The case has over 100cfm+ of blowers in it
2) You use blower style heatsinks with fans to exhaust the air directly out the back

I run a similar custom config as above for my dual p3's except I don't use the blower heatsinks and the exhaust temp for the case with 72F intake is around 85F at the powersupply (300w) and around 80 where the rest of the exhaust is. Cpu's are a good 20c below the p3's max plate temp of 69c and thats at full load.

Eventually I'll run temp tests on dual athlons but their expensive to buy just to test them out ^_^