phpBB auto-scaling

Question

I'm currently working on a large project which is expected to have a large amount of user activity. We're currently developing the website using Amazon Web Services so that we can ensure that if needed the site will scale to handle user load.

A part of the site is the forums where users can come together and discuss topics. The phpBB forums need to be integrated into the website and also need the ability to scale along with the rest of the site should user load be an issue.

My question therefore is can phpBB handle going from one server to many, whilst still running off the same database? Also would there be any tricky issues in this area, such as session management?

I've also asked this question on the official forums:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=2138145

Cheers, Thomas.

Answer 1

From the phpBB forums, in response to my question:

"Assuming you are scaling by deploying more front end servers the problem areas you will have are uploaded user content (avatars, attachments) and cache. You will need some way of replicating/sharing the uploaded content between your front end nodes. The default phpBB cache is stored in the file system you could share this with NFS/whatever, but you are probably best switching to using the memcache driver for phpBB's cache.

phpBB sessions are stored in the database so you'll be fine in that regard."