Problem with Reiser is real world performance. Or lack of. Yes, you'll find benchmarks that sing its praises. I'll tell you here and now, its not suited to a busy YaBB

To keep my old YaBB site up, I had to turn off ext3 journalling, and disable atime on the mount that held it...   ...and that was on a mirrored pair of disks, managed by a HP SMART Array P400 with 512Mb battery backed write cache, set to 75% write, 25% read (without journalling, need to get commits straight into the battery backed cache asap - and Linux does an OK-ish job of read caching itself).

JonB wrote on Feb 25^th, 2013 at 7:02pm:

I'm guessing this may not be what you meant by interesting, but the following bit of news is interesting:

"Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer."

The Boy wrote on Feb 25^th, 2013 at 3:34pm:

i am not a Linux man but i been doing some looking on the inodes count issue  and to fix it all you need to do is use REISERFS FILE SYSTEM  rather than going with ext2/ext3, Because REISERFS FILE SYSTEM have the inbuilt capability to handle millions of chunks of files one of the pages i saved when i was looking at this is Using the New Linux ReiserFS Filesystem http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/625421/Using-the-New... but as i am not a Linux man i can't test it but i think it is worth a try if some one can test it.

@ The Boy -
I agree. In the end, two primary problems haunt larger YaBB installations - the inodes count issue and the difficulty (not everyone is a server geek after all) of bringing more horsepower to the challenge.  A database-driven backend addresses both of those issues.

There are other advantages to using a database back-end, indexing (performance), integration with other apps, report writing/extraction, and better support for non-latinate character sets primarily.  We have another idea on some of that. (YaBB 2.7   )

And that is why we have a road-map that calls for a Basics /flatfile version and a Next/MySQL (MySQL only for now) database version.

Thanks for all your support of YaBB

As Dandello indicated - a well thought through database (MySQL) version is about two whole steps away.

We are making more progress than we had anticipated as the YaBB Next Team (Dandello et al) has already fixed many of our UTF-8 related data-to-presentation issues.  That is one of the huge hurdles - ISO to UTF-8 conversion. For a MySQL version to 'integrate' properly with other packages and utilities, we have to store all the data in UTF-8 format if we want to continue to support non-Latinate character sets.

I'm the geek who is looking into the 'archiving' option mentioned. I have a working theory I have discussed with Corey and Dandello that may solve a variety of issues: archiving, inter-forum transfers (such as move members or topics to a different YaBB install).  It may also provide the ability to interface our flatfile system with other scripts, tools and databases.  This is important as we 'plan' to split YaBB into a YaBB Basics version (UTF-8 flatfile with a lot of pre-defined options) and YaBB Next (full extensibility and MySQL).  My 'data' solution may resolve many of the issues (albeit indirectly).

Sadly, for the past three months my consulting and development work has kept me from making a lot of progress.  I'm dealing with a technical meltdown that must be resolved soon.  I have been working 6-7 days a week, 12-14 hours a day, plus my 'YaBB' stuff.  I have started on this 'data idea' work, and I'm trying to see if I can line up another developer/architect to work on this with me. It's not really a 'moon-shot', but we are in un-tested waters and I have a big learning curve before I can write a methodology that others can work with and expand on.  I'll make a stab at getting it all on paper in the next two weeks.  

I want to emphasize - this idea/theory is NOT a 'different flavor' of database - so our eyes are still on MySQL for scalable installations of YaBB.

Thanks to all for your support and interest in YaBB.

Bill Myers wrote on Feb 10^th, 2013 at 4:53pm:

The Boy archived his forum as you have stated above.

Plenty conversion scripts to import your data and plenty free and paid forum software available.

I have setup all types of forum but YaBB looks sleek and the admin panel is functional and easy to follow. Sub-boards are just about here and Database integration will come with time  

Creating a mySQL version of YaBB will take some very serious consideration to do it right. It won't happen overnight. But it is on the roadmap.

Another idea under consideration - creating a way to archive old posts so that they're no longer in the Messages folder but still accessible for reading.
This is just in the idea phase.

It's great that YaBB comes to life again! I use YaBB since 2001 and always loved it. I also tried for example phpBB but I did not like it.

By the way, one of the main reasons for me to use YaBB is that it does not use MySQL! I love the flatfile system, it's easy to maintain, edit and control. And it's not THAT slow at all. If YaBB would start to use MySQL or similar database systems, I think I would not use that versions.

I think YaBB is and always has been a board system for people who like to be outside the mainstream. YaBB is a special system for special people