Forum Software

[toolman]

I've been following the development of two separate scritps and have used both in times past. XMB [xmbforum.com] and IkonBoard [ikonboard.com] both seem to have come a long way and they both have tons of features for free software.

XMB runs on PHP and MySQL. IkonBoard is Perl and flatfiles(?).

I am wondering the opinions from scripting masters )heehee( who might have thoughts one way or the other.

[Drastic]

Well, I am no scripting expert, but I have run across several discussions about forum software, usually comparing UBB to vBulletin. UBB uses PERL with flat files, and vB uses PHP and MySQL.

From what I understand, when you get a larger forum base (10s of thousands of posts), flat files tend to put a major strain on the server, whereas database driven forums scale easily. Most people tout vB as the way to go. Lots of hacks out there for vB as well.

[rcjordan]

I've run across several discussions which indicate the PHP and MySQL boards also begin to have unforeseen/unexpected load problems when the volume gets high. With the WebmasterWorld forum scripts, I believe Brett tried moving away from flatfiles but returned because the performance didn't materialize.

[Brett_Tabke]

The big problem with most database servers is that they are limited in the number of connections they can make simultaneously. Some are limited to as few as 64, or 128. That would mean the during peak system times, lags would sky rocket as connections pile up and wait to be serviced. We can often see 300-400 page view per minute here during peak hours. Not uncommon for us to do 3-4k views in a 30min stretch in the am rush hour and late afternoons. Average and off hours is much lower of course, but the highest I ever recorded was 1100 requests in one minute.

The flat file system, puts the load on the file system and not a db server. MySql will not cache well when you get into larger dbs - the file system will cache well and longer.

The sql system will of course scale better at the large end. Currently, we have 30k files on the system related to the board. Going to sql, would reduce that to about 10k and if I had mod_rewrite available, I could reduce it to about 300.

So I'm sticking with the flat files for now. As we get to some magical "breaking point", I'll start by moving older posts into a "archive" set of forums. I think it is good to go for atleast another year before I have to worry about it.