Over the past few months I’ve noticed quite a few webloggers arguing that a weblog is sort of a replacement, and in some cases a response, to discussion forums where the signal-to-noise ratio is often very low. Many webloggers don’t even have any sort of online comments facility at all.
I take the opposite view — I don’t really spend much time participating on other discussion forums, but I think having a flexible, easy-to-use discussion system is essential for a web log or a web site.
I know, for example, that I am far from infallible and would prefer to give people a way to immediately point out any boneheaded errors I make.
So one of the main questions I had two-and-a-half years ago when I switched to Conversant was how well the software would scale with a large message base and relatively high traffic. And the answer is very well.
In just the past couple of weeks the total number of individual messages on this server passed the 60,000 mark, and on a given day about 40 to 80 new messages are posted.
As far as traffic, hundreds of people receive those messages via e-mail, and web traffic in recent days has been in the 16,000 to 18,000 page views per day. On most days this server is pumping out more than 200 megabytes of traffic, which is pretty large considering most of the content is relatively graphics-lite.
And even on days when the page view level jumps to 20,000+ I don’t notice any appreciable slow downs, which is a pretty darn neat trick considering everything is dynamically generated with conditional macros that can show about a dozen different version of some pages depending on user status, page type, etc.