[gentoo-dev] Migrating to a commercial PHP-based forums package for forums.gentoo.org

[Kurt Lieber <klieber@gentoo.org>]

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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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