As many of you have noticed, the forums have been having significant performance problems lately. Without going into the gory details, most of these issues have to do with the inefficient way phpBB 2.0.x interacts with the database.
Right now, the apache part of the forums are hosted on OSU's cluster of dual xeon boxes and the database part is hosted by a dual xeon w/ 4GB of RAM, so there is ample hardware behind us. Adding more hardware is not likely to be a tenable solution. We have a couple of options we're considering, none of which are ideal. One option is to delete older posts and/or move them to an "archive" section which would be unsearchable or really hard to search (which is, imo, effectively deleting them because nobody is going to sift through all that) Another option is to migrate to an alternate forums package. Specifically, vBulletin, which has proven to be quite scalable and effective with larger sites. The main drawback to this is the fact that it is a commercial software package, which tends to raise the ire of some of the more zealous GNU folks out there. So, my question to you is, how would you feel if we were to do this? Horribly offended? Saddened because there isn't a GPL'd program to meet our needs, but pragmatic about the need to do *something*? Or C, none of the above? Basically, the choice comes down to one of two things: 1) Lose some older posts and stay on a GPL-compatible package 2) Move to a commercial solution and keep all the posts. Note that vBulletin *is* open source in that you have access to the source code and can modify it. It's just not Free. Finally, to keep this process somewhat manageably, I ask that you make your responses on the forums. I've also set up a poll there so we can vote on what should be done. I will likely limit my responses to that discussion. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=554174 --kurt
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