I just read your well-written performance information page, which suggests planning ahead and limiting the total number of forums for performance reasons since it involves database queries and display loops, .i.e. don’t go crazy and create thousands of them.

Our original plan, and what we have built and are lightly testing in a soft launch is 9 or 10 forums.

However, we have realized that there is a strong business case to provide a unique private forum to small groups within our target community. Each small group would have access to a forum that only their group can access.  I don’t know how many groups might want a forum; I’d guess it could top out at 25 – 35, perhaps much lower.  There would also by necessity be a forum group added for each private forum to manage access.  I am inclined to make each private forum a sub-forum.

Is this reasonable within the Simple-press design?  The total number of members is likely to just be in the hundreds, not thousands.  Assume I am running on appropriate hosting, increasing processor/memory availability as necessary.

I know estimating performance is as much art as science, but would just like to get a better idea of what is reasonable before I go down a path that is likely to become a problem.

Thanks,

Kelly