Performance is determined by three things:

1) The amount of data present
2) The number of people visiting
3) The server hardware & configuration

Any one of these three things impacts performance.

The more data present, the more work the code has to do (and the more work the operating system has to do for the code) in order to do simple things. A board with 10,000 member records will perform noticably slower than a board with only 1,000. A forum with 5,000 topics will perform slower than a forum with 500. In fact, a single really large, really popular forum can drag down the entire board.

Why? That's point number two. UBB uses some majorly overkill file locking methods in an attempt to ensure data consistancy. In short, only one request from one user can be handled at a time. A really, really large board with only a handful of users browsing (say, a dozen requests a minute during prime time) will perform better than a really small board with LOTS of users visiting (say, two requests every second during prime time).

Because requests to larger forums are slower, a single long-running request by a single user can cause massive delays for everyone else. (This is why we advise turning off Recent Visitors - it's SLOW.)

Very, very good server hardware can offset much of the data and user-related performance problems, to a point. We've had 6-series boards receive up to three million monthly pageviews, with the assistance of the Accelerator. The three million mark is the current performance plateau for the 6-series.

If you could give me that pageview number from your control panel, I could give you some solid recommendations as to what to do with further growth. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

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