SMF Maximum Number of Users

[chamacao]

Hi all.
I used this wonderful software on a closed board for more than 5 years. I have only 40 users at various time making topics under the same admin.. user name. I'm about to go public with over 7400 topics. I understand that the number of users that can use 1 installation of SMF will vary with several factors. Including server sharing and all that stuff. But does any one have an idea of the maximum amount (more or less) of users SMF can handle on a dedicated server setup.

I see this fantastic support side have some figures in the 50 and 60 members at one time. Will it handle 1000 users at the same time? Under which conditions.

Hope this is the posting area for this. Thanks to all in advance.

[Illori]

it all depends on the stats of the server that is running the forum.

[Arantor]

It's so much more complex than that, and depends on mods involved, server configuration, levels and types of cache.

On a properly tuned setup, I've seen SMF cope with 90000 posts per day (more than 1 per second for a full day) but from the size of site you describe, I suspect a dedicated server will be way more than adequate for a while.

[Kindred]

on a dedicated server, I have a forum with 50k users and almost 3 millions posts....

[chamacao]

Thank You All.

The board started by several agriculture researchers trying to eliminate misinformation and sometimes lack of real information about growing fruits and veg. As well as finding proper financing to do it. It has not been easy and it will never be finish. I do not believe that will exceed 25000 pots. There's still several angry faces of boards that are yet to be finish.

Sorry back to the point.

The board main use is during conferences with speakers and an audience, sometimes in the hundreds, 2 or 3, trying to follow the speaker area of expertise in through the topics. Posting is not allowed unless you are a researcher that specialize in the field. Therefore we are not concerned about the number of post per minutes or per day. But, in the ability of the software for 300 people to log in and follow alone. Plus, others that may be in remote locations.

We can really see 6 or 7 hundred people log in at the same time. Will it handle this?
Right now is on a shared server but in 35 to 40 days (spring) will go into a dedicated one.

All suggestions and criticisms are more than welcome. If you like to take a look.
The board is at http://superiorfarming.org/  you may log in as smfsupport for username and musa1010 as the pwd.

Thanks.

[br360]

Based on what you are projecting I would consider looking into a decent vps. I agree with Arantor that a dedicated may be a bit more than you need

[drewactual]

if they're not posting and just reading as you describe, you're going to be fine.  what i would suggest prior to a webinar, is to post/release material prior for review to entice the audience to navigate through the page.  the strategy is simple: attempt to get them (the computers) to cache the meat of the page... with the use of OPCache or something akin, and some reasonable cache expiration on everything but the dynamic content- you're neither going to tax the reads from RAM or Disk until you reach some just off the charts visitors, unless you're running on a flimsy server.

OPCache is a script cache- meaning it runs a script (such as php) and stores the results of that script in RAM- this means the server doesn't have to run the script every time it is requested (which often requires a DB query).... it runs from RAM as opposed to several round trips of processor work and reads from hard disk and database...  as an example i watched the server load on my site drop from hitting mid nineties percentages and redline to rarely if ever breaking 15% and cold as ice.  this was with 100~125 or so concurrent users active at the time and over 1k users online.  OPCache is a very good tool... ask your host to set you up if it isn't available, and if it is available let us know- I can offer you the settings/config for it that has worked well for me- you plant them in your htacceess or php.ini file.   

[Arantor]

Any decent managed host should have opcache enabled these days, it's not like it's consudered experimental (it came in with 5.5 and so it's a few years established now)

[chamacao]

Thank you all
Great solution.

Drewactual, 1&1 Ionos does have OPCache available and instructions to make it work. That was good to know.

Arantor... thanks.