Hello, I am currently running a forum with approximately:
• 800,000 topics
• Around 12,000 daily active users
• Hosted on a dedicated server with 64GB RAM
I am considering migrating to Discourse and would like to understand:
1. At this scale, would Discourse require any special customization or architectural adjustments?
2. Is a single 64GB dedicated server generally sufficient?
Any advice or experience from similar migrations would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you！
That’s likely more than enough. How many daily pageviews do you have?
Our forum generates approximately 400,000 page views per day.
Because users have a very high search frequency, and considering there are 800,000 topics, I am wondering whether some customized search solution might be necessary.
I think that’s enough hardware. I don’t think you need to customize search. There are Discourse sites with millions of topics.
Depends on your disk performance. If your disk is too slow (IOPS) and your database can’t be cached in memory for most operations, it can quickly become a bottleneck.
Not really, but your specific usage pattern may discover some corner cases. At this scale, specially on the first month it’s a good idea to keep an eye for slow pages and checking if the database needs more resources, vacuum or tuning.
Purely out of curiosity, I’d be interested to know. What software is your forum currently running on, meaning what will you be migrating from?
Hello,
it is currently running on a privately developed PHP-based system. However, I believe Discourse would be more suitable and efficient for our needs, and its maintenance team appears to be very professional.
Therefore, we are considering migrating to Discourse.
Not wanting to appear over-praising, but yes, they are.
Solid ethics (rare enough to be emphasized), solid skills, well-maintained software, always moving forward rather than falling behind on outdated technologies, and excellent support both from the devs and the community here on meta.discourse.org.
I truly feel the same — it’s always moving forward and never standing still.