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How well does GF scale?

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How well does GF scale?
I'm considering replacing an old non-SQL based threaded messageboard system with GF; migrating to GF by writing a few scripts to pull the old posts out of the flat-file structures used straight into the GF SQL tables, and likewise for the user records.

The problem: the old board has been around since June 1999, and so far has had 260,191 messages posted across 8 forums. The intention is to run the new system on a quad Pentium-Pro 200MHz/2Mb L2 box with 2Gb of RAM under linux, mod_perl and MySQL 3.23.

Has anyone had any experience of running a GF installation of this size - let alone on a machine of that spec? Can GF readily scale that big? Is there any hope of Search working usably? My real concern is as to how well the system will scale into the future - can I expect anything better (or worse) than performance scaling linearly with size?

Cheers,

Arathorn.
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co-sysadmin; theonering.net
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Re: [Arathorn] How well does GF scale? In reply to
This forum could be used as an example...there are over 200,000 posts (I did a quick countup) and a pretty decent number of new posts daily and it copes well.

A quad 200mhz is 800mhz....if possible you may want something slightly faster but your ram seems ok.
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Re: [Paul] How well does GF scale? In reply to
Thanks, Paul - does anyone happen to know what the spec of the machine that runs this forum is?
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co-sysadmin; theonering.net
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Re: [Arathorn] How well does GF scale? In reply to
Hi,

It's an amd 900 with 1 gig of ram. Not a powerhouse by any means (and it's also running a lot of other perl scripts).

You should see much better then linear scaling. The search uses a search index and doesn't do a full text scan, so performance is quite good even with a large number of posts.

Hope that helps,

Alex
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