beor / vern,
i have tried using SMF on a small forum before
(a community of poets in Manila) and i have observed nga mas efficient ang SMF compared to vB. efficient in the sense that, when you compare an SMF forum versus a vB forum - with both sites getting about the same traffic - the SMF forum will need much less powerful hardware to serve pages - hence faster kung same sad ang server specs between the 2. another way of putting it would be, that in generating pages, lesser queries are done in an SMF forum compared to vB. SMF db queries also seem more optimized compared to vB's.
ingon ana ra nuon ka-gamay akong experience with SMF, just one small site, and my observation is based on that experience lang.
as for vB forum software - i have experience with it since vB was launched in 2000
(was the 15th user to signup in their forum since it went live in Apr 2000), and my experience comes from running a huge board - the worlds 18th largest English speaking forum (
http://rankings.big-boards.com/?filter=all,EN&p=all) - and probably the PH's #1 biggest forum also (
but I don't have data to back this specific claim - assumption lang ni, and maybe I'm wrong).
8 years of running vB on a very large forum and I have learned one thing - vB is a hungry-hungry resource beast! if I have a choice of easily migrating to SMF then i'll definitely do it - it's almost impossible lang because of the bulk of the data that need to be migrated (almost 25 million posts in the vB forum i run as of this posting).
my guess is that you get around 300 to 500 users visiting the site at the same time right? and presently running iStorya on just 1 dedicated server acting both as web and db server? (
nag-kita ug nagka-storya mi ni albert sometime last year - i think i heard this from him)
and with all these you are still able to have a forum that can serve pages fast. i think this is due mainly to the efficiency of SMF. kung vB pa inyong gamit, you would need at least 2 servers to host a site as big as yours, a dedicated apache server, plus a dedicated mysql server.
the entire point of my post is - what's in vB diay that's tempting you to move to it? and will those "features" be worth the extra hardware - or at the very least the hardware upgrade needed to run vB efficiently?
personally, i think SMF kicks arse - nindot na kaayu siya that it's actually the people running vB who are envious of those using SMF, and wish they can migrate to SMF, not the other way around.
an example to that is the really neat feature in SMF that i like so much, the "Show new replies to your posts" function. wala ni sa vB. i actually tried to do a quick hack in vB just so i can copy this function - the result was almost a disaster. whenever i used said function - ma abot sa langit ang load average sa akong mysql server - so i dumped the whole thing.
wishing you the best of luck sa inyong endeavors mga boss. if you ever want to see a working vB forum on the server level up close before you do the migration, msg me - i'd be glad to help (
i've sold and bought quite a lot of stuff thru iStorya - mao ni akong pasalamat).