Lots of users in MOS Forum: Problem or not?

[Regenerate]

I have a question for y’all from a friend of mine (I didn’t have the answer so…):

"I want to make a site with a forum that might potentially get lots of visitors (100 users or more online at the same time). Someone showed me Mambo (that would be me ) and I fell in love by the way it looks and handles. But: can Mambo and the Mambo forums handle that and which is my best choice?"

I said:

But I told him I thought it would be more a server issue that a forum-software issue. Besides that, the downside of using a forum inside mambo in stead of using a stand-alone forum (when getting lots of visitors): with every page you view you also get a mambo surrounding. Looks great but this means your server needs to handle double the MySQL queries (which slows down server performance).

What is your opinion? Free software as a solution is preferred


Forums available as Mambo Component:

• Loudmouth (no more updates?)
• Simpleboard (too simple/too light? Lots of MySQL queries so needs a bigger server)
• PhpBB (can handle lots of users, for example: http://forum.mamboserver.com, used outside of mambo though)

More possible useful links:

• vBulletin
• Mambo vB (Mambo version/hack, you can addon vBulletin and use same userdatabase for both. Great forum, licence costs about $85)
• MamboServer forum

[utki]

Better to go with a stand-alone forum, working outside of Mambo, if he expects that kind of user load, otherwise as you suggest he may strike performance problems under load when running both apps on the one shared system.

You can add to the suggestion list the following forum packages:

• Invision Power Board ( download free version here ) is very powerful, and has lots of settings that let you customise it and tune resource usage. I quite like Invision.
• MiniBB http://www.minibb.net/ a light-weight but still well featured forum package
• punBB http://www.punbb.org/, the current reigning champion low-resource usage open source forum but still with reasonable features (and optional add-ins etc etc)

If he expects big user numbers for his forum, and doesn't need user account integration with Mambo, he should also consider remotely hosting his forum on another box to the one running his Mambo site (usually done via sub-domaining the forum eg forum.mysite.com > remote forum). For performance and management reasons.

In the case of Invision, Invision also do forum hosting for about $10/ month, with full support from the people who wrote the app, and essentially no performance limits on the forum either. I've used that option, and it has worked well. I was able to turn on every single bell and whistle of the software, and not worry about resource usage anymore. All you then have to do is visually integrate the forum into your site, which is not too hard.

Utki

[lazarus_bitmap]

There are some tweaks you can do to Mambo as well to help deal with the extra overhead -- like using multiple templates, and calling templates where the forum is involved that leave out the editor call and other features that tend to impact performance. I've designed some sub-templates that scale Mambo back to the bare minimum -- calling no modules, no editor, etc. to keep performance in line.

Real question is how much you need an integrated CMS/Community, and how much you could just go with a standalone community system, plus the hardware and bandwidth you have to play with.

[brad_mn1988]

I was tending toward vBulletin since this forum is so extremely cool! And I am thrilled that there is a hack to integrate it with my existing Mambo stuff.

Basically, I am wondering what to use for my Consulting Business site where I was thinking of creating forums for Clients about the projects I am working on... but if one client is angry about something (never happens, but... ) I don't want other clients to be seeing those threads.

I was considering that a good forum might mitigate a bugtracker system -- make the clients feel like they are participating in development rather than just yelling at me about bugs.

I don't know whether to use bugtracker (Mantis ?) or a Forum or both... and with my needs for groups and privileges vBulletin seems to be pretty extensive and it is feeling like I might need to use it exclusive of Mambo for my privileges needs(?).

But free is always a good thing so I am looking at Simpleboard and others too.

I apologize that this is such an open ended "how should I run my business" kind of question, but matching the right technology to the problem kind of required I go into that squishy area.

Thanks in advance.
Brad

[pixelsoul]

I dont think youl have ant problems with php.. i would just optimise the template since all css code is stored within the html itself instead of inside a seperate file.

[Veyz]

I also like Invision Power Board.

Phpbb forums can handle a lot of users to and it is not a problem handling 100 users. Some of the biggest forum boards uses Phpbb like Gaia online forums.