How many users can Discourse handle?
Yes, I clearly have a crazy idea. And yes, the admin burden would be bananas. And any structure would need to be very carefully built. But is it possible?
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the feasibility of a Discourse forum with over 100,000 people. nathank initially asked if it is possible, to which david replied that it is, citing examples of forums with over 1 million users and the meta forum with 42k users. However, SoTC48 pointed out that the question might be about concurrent users. nathank clarified that he meant absolute numbers in the user database. marianord added that technically, Discourse can scale up, and issues are more related to traffic and server size. He suggested using a separated database and data deployment for large traffic and increasing server size for intermittent usage.
Yes, it’s possible - we host a number of forums with well over 1 million users in the database. Here on meta, we have 42k.
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I think his question is: how many concurrent users can the most popular site bear?
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It is a good question too, but no, I just meant absolute numbers in the user database
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Technically, Discourse, and most softwares would be able to scale up to a point you don’t really need to worry about.
Discourse powering forums like Gitlab’s, Let’s Encrypt’s, Mozilla’s this is in no way an issue. If you know you will have a lot of traffic go for a separated database and data deployment, if the traffic won’t be huge, but you’ll have a lot of users using the platform intermittently, you just need to keep an eye in the response times and increase the server size.
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