Question on JForums Database space

[Suleman zia]

Hello Ranchers,

I tried to post a question on the JForums community but it looks like that no one can register over there anymore as i get an error of Java.util.arraylist. Since JavaRanch is running on top of JForums i thought you might be able to answer my simple question.

I am implementing JForums for one of our production application. We have close to 4000 users registered. As of now we don't know how many people will take advantage of the forums software (Like creating topics, uploading files, etc) which we are implementing until it goes live. My question to you is how much database space do you think should be appropriate for JForums ?. We are using Postgres 8.3. Any issues which you encountered while merging the software will be very helpful. As of now i have made alot of changes and has been testing thoroughly on my local machine. Found couple of bugs with SSO and the forum software itself but was able to fix it also.

Thank you

[Bear Bibeault]

Moved to the Open Source Projects forum.

[Jaikiran Pai]

Suleman zia wrote:Any issues which you encountered while merging the software will be very helpful. As of now i have made alot of changes and has been testing thoroughly on my local machine. Found couple of bugs with SSO and the forum software itself but was able to fix it also.

Thank you

I don't know the answers to your other questions, but you might find this journal article by Jeanne useful. Jeanne played a major part in the forum migration and has blogged about some of it here

[Ulf Dittmer]

Asking about DB size is a bit odd. Hard disk space is so cheap these days that it rarely makes sense to worry about it, certainly not for a DB that mostly contains human-created text (the amount of which is likely not to grow all that fast). Why are you concerned about that?

[Suleman zia]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:Asking about DB size is a bit odd. Hard disk space is so cheap these days that it rarely makes sense to worry about it, certainly not for a DB that mostly contains human-created text (the amount of which is likely not to grow all that fast). Why are you concerned about that?

Thanks for your reply. I asked this question just to get a general idea about the DB space from people who have experience with the forums software and when you work for a company every penny does count :--) . I think i will go with 20GB for the start.

[Suleman zia]

Jaikiran Pai wrote:

Suleman zia wrote:Any issues which you encountered while merging the software will be very helpful. As of now i have made alot of changes and has been testing thoroughly on my local machine. Found couple of bugs with SSO and the forum software itself but was able to fix it also.

Thank you

I don't know the answers to your other questions, but you might find this journal article by Jeanne useful. Jeanne played a major part in the forum migration and has blogged about some of it here

This is very useful. Thanks for sharing.

[Ulf Dittmer]

I think i will go with 20GB for the start.

Even for a company where every penny counts, that doesn't make sense. The price differential between a 20GB disk and a 200GB disk is so small these days, that this will turn into a loss if you even have to move the DB once in the app's lifetime because of limited disk space. While 20GB is plenty for a stock JForum installation, DBs have a tendency to acquire new tables and new attributes over time, in addition to the growing amount of data. It may seem penny-wise to save on hard disk space, but it's pound-foolish.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Suleman zia wrote:I My question to you is how much database space do you think should be appropriate for JForums ?.

It's impossible to say. It depends on how much content you will have. I realize you don't know this either, so you'll have to guess. I agree with Ulf that it's better to have more space than less.

Suleman zia wrote:Any issues which you encountered while merging the software will be very helpful.

The links Jaikiran provided contain most of my thoughts on this topic. One big thing - we decided to fork from JForum 2.1.8 and are not merging our changes into the main stream. This means we own our fork forever. If you ever want to pull in JForum again, I recommend donating as many of your changes back to JForum 3 as possible.

That said, we make more changes that you'll need to. Partly because we needed backward compatibility with our old forum software.

[Suleman zia]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:

I think i will go with 20GB for the start.

Even for a company where every penny counts, that doesn't make sense. The price differential between a 20GB disk and a 200GB disk is so small these days, that this will turn into a loss if you even have to move the DB once in the app's lifetime because of limited disk space. While 20GB is plenty for a stock JForum installation, DBs have a tendency to acquire new tables and new attributes over time, in addition to the growing amount of data. It may seem penny-wise to save on hard disk space, but it's pound-foolish.

Wish i can convince but thanks for your input. I will keep monitoring when it goes live to see how much the usage is. If it is extreme then probably will extend the DB space.

[Suleman zia]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:

Suleman zia wrote:I My question to you is how much database space do you think should be appropriate for JForums ?.

It's impossible to say. It depends on how much content you will have. I realize you don't know this either, so you'll have to guess. I agree with Ulf that it's better to have more space than less.

Suleman zia wrote:Any issues which you encountered while merging the software will be very helpful.

The links Jaikiran provided contain most of my thoughts on this topic. One big thing - we decided to fork from JForum 2.1.8 and are not merging our changes into the main stream. This means we own our fork forever. If you ever want to pull in JForum again, I recommend donating as many of your changes back to JForum 3 as possible.

That said, we make more changes that you'll need to. Partly because we needed backward compatibility with our old forum software.

The links provided to your blog are very helpful. I wanted to be part of JForum community to report the changes or bugs which i found and fixed it. Unfortunately, it looks like the forums are not supported anymore since you cannot even register.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Suleman zia wrote:The links provided to your blog are very helpful. I wanted to be part of JForum community to report the changes or bugs which i found and fixed it. Unfortunately, it looks like the forums are not supported anymore since you cannot even register.

You also can't login. And the last posts were almost two months ago.

http://jforum.net/contact.jsp gives a 404.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Error message when logging in:

For detailed error information, please see the HTML source code, and contact the forum Administrator.

java.util.ArrayList cannot be cast to java.lang.String

<!-- BEGIN ERROR STACK TRACE
java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.ArrayList cannot be cast to java.lang.String
at net.jforum.context.web.WebRequestContext.getParameter(WebRequestContext.java:331)
at net.jforum.context.web.WebRequestContext.getModule(WebRequestContext.java:457)
at net.jforum.JForum.service(JForum.java:167)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:820)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:502)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
at net.jforum.util.legacy.clickstream.ClickstreamFilter.doFilter(ClickstreamFilter.java:59)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1148)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:387)
at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:181)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765)
at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:417)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandlerCollection.handle(ContextHandlerCollection.java:199)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection.handle(HandlerCollection.java:114)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152)
at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:534)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.headerComplete(HttpConnection.java:864)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:539)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:212)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404)
at org.mortbay.io.nio.SelectChannelEndPoint.run(SelectChannelEndPoint.java:409)
at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:520)

END ERROR STACK TRACE-->

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I posted a link to this thread in http://www.guj.com.br/forums/show/17.java. It's a Portuguese forum, but some of the individuals there work on JForum. My thread is awaiting moderation. Even if they reject it (I posted in English), that still tells them jforum.net is down.

[Suleman zia]

Thanks Jeanne.