InnoDB vs. MYISAM?

Hey,

First, a suggestion: vbSEO needs a general non-vbSEO forum just for vBulletin discussion. I find vbSEO forums to be more helpful and to have more thorough actual vBulletin support than the official vB forums, from other vB owners to vbSEO developers/staffers that generously provide their own suggestions.

My question: I've read that InnoDB is better than vB's default MYISAM for large tables due to InnoDB's record locking while MYISAM can only invoke table locking (meaning an entire table can be unresponsive during high use). Any thoughts?

Also, I've gathered that MYISAM is generally faster, so preferred for smaller tables. But here are some stats on my larger tables:

- `pm`: 300,000 records
- `pmtext`: 250,000 records
- `post`: 2,000,000 records
- `visitormessage`: 300,000 records
- `thread`: 60,000 records (Small table, but I'm sure it's the most queried table after the post table).
Total DB size: 2.6gb

Adding a column to my `post` table already takes over 30 minutes. Can't imagine what it's like for real big board owners. I searched the forum and didn't see any English threads on the subject, so I'm interested in any suggestions from larger board owners who've possibly made the conversion.

I've found some other shortcomings with InnoDB:
- Supposedly uses more CPU/RAM than MYISAM -- is generally slower.
- Can't use fulltext indexes.
- Seems to be a lot of mixed recommendations on the subject, particularly in the vB.com forums.

Thanks!

Hello,

we had a recent discussion on this topic here:
http://www.vbseo.com/f221/storage-en...ghlight=innodb

Edit, never mind, that is the big board area which you don't have access to If you truly have a 2mln post board (500k is our minimum for status), please put a ticket in requesting Big Board group access so we can alter your permissions.


The biggest advantages to innodb are
- row locking (instead of myisam's table lock)
- true foreign key restraints

In most cases, myisam is faster for selects and updates/inserts and unless yo're using replication, staying with myisam is probably the better choice.