Randem Systems Support Board

We have tested phpbb version 3.1.5 with a very large amount of data of which had the following characteristics:

mySQL Database 5.5
php 5.3.24

1 Million Plus Posts
1 Hundred Thousand Plus Forums / Sub-Forums
63 Thousand Plus Users
15 Groups

our php5.ini file was configured as follows:

memory_limit = 2048M    ;Maximum amount of memory a script may consume
max_execution_time = 180
max_input_time = 60
upload_max_filesize = 200M

USAGE:

With this configuration phpbb has failed miserably and did not work at all. It worked fairly well with a relatively small amount of forums but as it gets larger it will become horribly slow; if it works at all. It is not the database that is the issue for it can handle much more data than we provided, it was the was the phpbb software was written. I will explain in detail what I mean. The system is forum based, this is fine but when you have a hundred thousand forums/sub-forums; to access all of these forums let say as the Administrator group the software creates 1 permissions record per forum for each group. So just for the Administrators to access each forum; one would need 100 thousand additional permissions records. Now multiply that times 15 groups and you need 15 Hundred thousand records for all groups to access all forums. Not that every group would need to access every forum but the numbers are staggering just for one group. Since phpbb caches the permissions for the forums when you sign on; the cached memory that would be needed to access any forum is enormous and this is what will not allow the system to work with very large numbers of forums. I have seen that one group can have multiple permissions to the same forum; now multiply that times each forum...

DATABASE:

The database design does not have enforced table relationships. This is not bad per se but it would prevent a developer from accidentally deleting a topic without deleting all the post for that topic first (safety measure); the same would go for deleting forums.

MODS:

phpbb has a large array of MODs written for it and this makes it easier to configure your system the way you want it.

Pros

Cons

• Due to the way phpbb was designed the forum software choked on our amounts of data and would not work at all after importing all the data.
  
  
• After importing the data phpbb would not run at all. This was due to the application caching the whole forum and it does not have the memory to accomplish this. There is no reason to cache an entire system unless it is relatively small. If the system plans to grow this becomes impossible