Can SMF run with large amounts of subforums - several thousand, perhaps?
I won't go into a lot of detail but the use case is several hundred mini communities with a number of subforums each, leading numbers to eventually be in the thousands. I know it's not a typical setup but the reason for it is baked into the project; only saying because "do you really need that many" isn't a valid response here as in this weird instance we do, lol. Concurrent users can range from 500-5000 at any given time.
The subforums wouldn't be shown on the main forum list, but rather accessed through a directory if that makes a difference. It's definitely on dedicated hardware, and throwing more hardware at it isn't a big deal, but I know some issues become exponential and impossible to mitigate through brute force, lol. It's hard to find any numbers on when things might become an issue and what might help reduce those issues.
There are limits based on the variable size...
But, honestly I think there are better designs for your setup, even based on your explanation
Having thousands of nested boards should be fine, provided that you have enabled caching in SMF's admin panel and you are using a well performing cache system. If you don't, you might see slowdowns on the board index page. Apart from that, performance will depend largely on your database engine and underlying hardware.
Quote from: dirtfilledcarriage on September 27, 2022, 01:47:58 PMCan SMF run with large amounts of subforums - several thousand, perhaps?
I won't go into a lot of detail but the use case is several hundred mini communities with a number of subforums each, leading numbers to eventually be in the thousands. I know it's not a typical setup but the reason for it is baked into the project; only saying because "do you really need that many" isn't a valid response here as in this weird instance we do, lol. Concurrent users can range from 500-5000 at any given time.
The subforums wouldn't be shown on the main forum list, but rather accessed through a directory if that makes a difference. It's definitely on dedicated hardware, and throwing more hardware at it isn't a big deal, but I know some issues become exponential and impossible to mitigate through brute force, lol. It's hard to find any numbers on when things might become an issue and what might help reduce those issues.
This sounds nuts to me
How do users find subforms that relate to them?
I would assume you would be running one or more queries for each subform?