On that hardware, you'll probably make it up to about 1.5 to 2 million pageviews before performance becomes a serious issue - so up to double your current traffic.

Around 2 million a month, performance will really start to suffer. This isn't really because of the server not being able to handle the load - the design of Classic is meant to provide saftey from corruption at the expense of speed. The brutal file locking scheme in use prevents scaling too much higher without throwing some major hardware at the board... and even that will only squeeze out another half million monthly pageviews.

You should seriously consider biting the bullet right now and moving off to UBB.threads. Double the memory in the machine, tweak out MySQL, and use a caching/compiling PHP accelerator, and you can probably get to 4 million monthly pageviews on that hardware.

(For UBB.classic, the performance bottleneck is the filesystem and the number of files present in a directory. For UBB.threads, it's the database and the size of your Posts table that will rule performance. You'll probably want to keep around less than 500,000 posts to get consistantly good performance on that hardware. The problem is mainly that there's only one server that has to share the load of the database and the application. In a really ideal situation, there would be a dedicated server just for the database, and another server just for the application, but that begins to get really expensive. The TrekBBS is on the same hardware you quoted, but with only 1.5 gigs of memory. It has to be kept pruned to 400,000 posts to keep MySQL performance acceptable.)

This thread for sale. Click here! [Linked Image from navaho.infopop.cc]