I just noticed....

[ShadowDamien]

When I looked at the bottom of the page when I was in the Talk of The Town forum, I noticed the 'view thread' for how far back you want to see the posts.
I can't believe I didn't know about it (how noobish), but I always have been on Phbb-something-like-that tpye of forum.

So I decided to see how many pages EMUTALK.NET had, since a few of you know that I am on multiple forums, I like to see the forum's past and you guys have 168 pages of threads!! Dating back to well... the beginning. Otherwise known as 2001.

Just a question, but due to the large amounts of sub-forums you guys have, wouldn't having 168 pages take up some space or something that would slow down the forum? I've seen this slow down other forums after almost all of the Subs had over 50 pages. Will this make any problems for this forum in the future as it inevitably grows in members?

 

[Doomulation]

As you know, vbulletin is a powerful commerical board software designed for big boards. Just so you know!
Oh and phpbb is kinda pathetic, it lacks many features that other forums have.

 

[zAlbee]

It's all in the strength of the database. In this case, MySQL.

Space is not the same as speed, don't confuse those two.

Rows in a database are indexed, which generally makes accessing data very fast. I don't know if/how performance degrades with size, but if it does it'll probably be gradual, so I don't see the point of asking these questions until we actually see problems arise. Emutalk is still going smoothly after all these years.

 

[Doomulation]

With thousands of viewers browse the board at the same time, thousands of calls to the mysql database are made. And whatever you say, database calls are slow because it needs to find the data and then transfer it to the code. All in all, a consuming task when done too much, which is why there are solutions for this. This is called caching.
Have you ever looked in vbulletin administration? I have once. Lots and lots of functions to speed up your board when it is growing really large.

 

[Jakob]

mysql also caches more frequently accessed rows in a table, so when it goes to retrieve the data, it isn't looking at every row in the table, it's looking at the most frequently accessed ones only(it will look at others if it fails to find them in the cache), which removes the performance penalty to a large extent