Hello everyone,
I’m doing some research into hosting a vBulletin.
We’re projecting up to about 6,500 simultaneous users, viewing image-heavy pages (using their content management systems).
Does anyone have any idea what kind of system specs we should be looking at?
Thanks!
As a note, we’re definitely considering using the cloud.
Hi,
Minimum Requirements: vBulletin is designed to run on every server that has PHP 5.2 or greater and MySQL 4.1.0 or greater installed.
It is recommended to use PHP 5.2.6, or later and MySQL 5.0.19 or later.
The software has been successfully installed on several different flavours of UNIX, as well as Windows™ 98/NT/2000/XP, and the Mac
Thank you.
I should have clarified. I’m looking for hardware requirements. Having 6500 simultaneous users is a lot different from having 50, so I’m looking for some hardware specs.
Thanks.
I help run a vBulletin forum that has a custom front end on it, this runs on a single server, dual Xeon 2GHz, 4GB ram, with suitable optimisations performed to vBulletin you can reduce the requirements drastically. Granted this averages 500 online sessions (5 minute timeout) but with a barely noticable server load, we push up to 2000 active sessions on this exact hardware during peak times.
When you say 6500 simultaneous, do you literally mean 6500 requests per second, or 6500 vBulletin sessions (and then, what session timeout? this can make a huge difference)
It’s not literally 6500 per second, but there may be this many users actively using it, so they’re all actively using it, stopping and reading, etc. Each user may spend about 5 minutes on a page, so you could save about 78,000 requests per hour (21/sec).
We think we are going to go with a cloud server which we can automatically scale way up during peak times without spending a fortune running at such high levels the whole time.
Using a cloud service like Amazon EC2, or Windows Azure is a good way to go. More so for just starting up. You cannot say for certain if your service is going to be a hit or a flop. Spend too little money on resources, with the service a hit. Site is down. Spend too much money on resources, with the service a flop. Wasted money down the drain. But with these cloud services can start out small and let the service handle the scale while only spending a few dollars.
I just started a PHP project for a client of mine, creating an internet-faced portal for his company on Windows Azure. Already it is just awesome being able to scale and be completely fault tolerant with a global reach. Would have taken a fortune to achieve that privately.
We’re actually not a startup by any means, but I know what you mean. =)
We actually went with Rackspace Cloud and have been very happy so far. It is nice to be able to scale it up. Right now we’re just running our dev box on 512 MB, but when it goes live we’ll be able to scale it WAY up (16 GB) for when we need. It is very nice.