How big is too big?

[FCB-ROGA]

I have a question: How big is too big for a database using IPB system (already upgraded to 3.1 if it matters). I guess I'm just worried as my back up zip file of the database grows... I wonder what problems can creep in. Maybe someone with a ton more experience than me with forum databases can give me a few pointers here.

Just to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with: 250,000 posts in 6 months so far from about 3000 members. The DB seems to be about 400 MB now, and at this point zipped up backup file is about 70 MB.

What problems are on my horizon :)

Thanks in advance for any advise!

[Biker.GA]

http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/304612-large-forum-db-question/page__view__findpost__p__1913023

[Ryan H.]

Are you on a dedicated server?


Reevaluate once you get to around 1 or 1.5Gb. With a well-optimized and good server setup, you could probably go several times beyond that; otherwise, the simple solution is to prune. I believe we usually tried to keep the number of stored posts between 1 and 2 million.

Size is not so much your enemy as performance. Two common things to help with that is to store the sessions table in memory if that's possible, and to install Sphinx to offload searching. MySQL doesn't like fulltext-searching large databases; Sphinx does. If you've already done those, you're well on your way.

[FCB-ROGA]

Thanks very much!

[bfarber]

I have worked on an IPB forum where the posts table ALONE was 4GB.

I think you're fine for a while. As your site grows you need to increase resources, but that is just a part of a growing website.