Very high volume message boards

dilbert

I am helping to put together a group of sports sites that do collectively about 10,000,000 to 25,000,000 daily page views and the majority of these come from the message boards.

Is there any software out there "off the shelf" that can handle this traffic efficiently without having to just throw hardware at it? The largest individual site would have about 2,000,000 daily pages views and that would also be largely on the message boards.

We've looked at vBulletin and WWWThreads but have not found one client yet that has anywhere near this volume. Any help is appreciated.

Anon

I am also new to message board scripts, but did like the phpbb.com message board. If that can't work, then hopefully someone else can help you out. I have looked at:
phpbb
ikonboard
vbulletin
DicusLite/Pro Forum
www.Phorum.org

You can find most of these at:
go to php.net, then up at the top is the links category, click that, then scroll a little, there's the hotscripts and php resource websites, check into those to see if one fits your needs.

I am still learning how to put the darn message board together myself, being a newbie so far has some ups/downs.

Good Luck...now back to trying to figure out this shopping cart from the Wrox book tutorial, so I can get it to work for our client. Sigh...Anyone help? I already posted my question on it.
adios
Kewlphper

dilbert

Yes, I am familiar with those that you listed and after looking at them the best I could determine is that vBulletin and WWWThreads were the most robust.

I just thought that there might be someone here that has had experience with another product that might be written for really high volume sites that we could look at.

Anon

ive been working on a discussion board. its very basic so it should be able to handle high volume. it is also very 'modifiable' by design. http://xhawk.net/discussion/

-paul

Anon

I've never implemented any message-board software, but I there's been some discussion recently at Home Theater Forum .com .

Basically, they were using UBB and didn't like it. So they switched to V-Bulletin. They like it even less and are going back to UBB. They are hobbyists, with about 100,000 hits/day, and can't afford to upgrade hardware to get the forum code to work well.

Here's a quote from their comments:

"Nearly 1 month ago, we upgraded to V-BULLETIN software. We had hoped this software would improve our overall performance.

We are a forum that gets read by 100,000 people PER DAY and an average of 550 new signups per month (that we approve). The strain on our forum during peak hours far exceeds what the software can handle.

V-BULLETIN is just not doing the job. As rotten as UBB was, V-BULLETIN has caused even more problems. This does not just include forum access speed, but all sorts of display problems for our members using AOL, WebTV, and older versions of popular browsers.

On Tuesday May 8th, we will revert back to UBB software and just stick with it until something better comes along."

dilbert

That is helpful. I've never seen anyone recommend UBB over vBulletin but this is a very busy forum and they know what each is doing to their server. I see they are using verison 2.0 and they have a newer version of 2.0 out now. I wonder if that would help prevent them from having to revert back to UBB?

brandonr

CGI over PHP? How dare thee! 🙂

Anon

I've created a forum wich is able performing increadibly fast...

check it out at http://www.lkff.nl (then forum in left menu)

if you want extra help on how i did that lemme know..

Anon

The problem with PHP for such high volume traffic sites is that PHP is a run time compiled language.

First it compiles, and then it executes the script - that's not like C. In C all the programs are compiled already, meaning that when you fetch the program to be executed - it is in binar form already, so it talks directly to machine without wasting CPU cycles on being compiled first.

Let's say you have 2,000,000 hits/day site. If each of these hits envoke php script, than that's 2,000,000 compilations and executions - that's quite a load. May be PHP compiler is your solution, (PHP Encoder is 2000 dollars from zend.com) or you could write message board application in C. C is fast!!!

Other than that hardware should be your solution.

kparker

Yep, for that volume of traffic, you better be prepared to throw some serious hardware at it no matter what.

Anon

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Anon

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Anon

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