As some of you know, we host what may be the largest publicly accessible UBBt forums on the web. We're working towards migrating to UBB7.1 when it is released.

Are there any things new in UBB7.1 (over 6.5.5) which are likely to drain our resources? I know about unread post counts (which was also an issue in 6.5.5 and earlier) but there are so many new features that I don't want to fall in love with some and then find that we can't use them with several thousand users routinely online at the same time. (Obvious example: the shout box would never work in that kind of environment...even if there is no performance hit.)

All things being equal, should I expect better, worse, or about the same performance given the new database structure?

Thanks for any advice.

Chuck Weinstock
The Two Plus Two Forums

Some people have had issues with the shoutbox lagging their forums; the resolve is to simply disable it. If you require a chat script there is a java irc mod at UBBDev that provides similar functionality but utilizes no extra resources.

i'd expect better preformance, ubbt7 is almost a complete rewrite from 6.5 so rick tried to streamline/fix things from how they previously where.

What hardware set-up do you have?

That is one large forum

The big thing is at some point we're just at the mercy of the hardware and configuration. We've stripped out a bunch of queries from the older versions with the rewrite. Some places where it used to take 3 queries to get the info, we can now do with 1 query. However, that being said, whenever MySQL gets that many rows in the table it really will depend on hardware and configuration. You'll want to have a very tweaked mysql config file to make sure it's operating at it's best capacity with that large of a data set.

For serving the forums we have two high speed processors. One processor's main duty is to run ubbt 6.5.5 and serve pages. The other's only job is to run the database. They are connected by a highspeed Ethernet. Both processors have lots of memory and raid disks.