Possible Hit for Number of Tables

[Sam Charette]

Hi there!

I'm a moderate newbie in mySQL. I've set it up before, and tend to use it for all of my applications. I've joined in with another group of people who are doing something very strange on their forum software, and I was hoping to get some information on how it might affect the database server, as the specifics are outside of my knowledge.


Essentially, we want to give everyone their own forum, and by everyone I mean about 1,500 users. Currently, it's just a matter of inserting 1,500 records into a table, which is peanuts for mySQL.

BUT one of the admins wants to change everything around so that each forum gets its own database of 24 tables. That's a worst-case scenario of 36,000 tables.

Granted, the cache would have to grow from the default, and not all of these forums would be receiving more than a small amount of use, but I was wondering if someone here could give me an idea as to how this many tables in 1,500 databases, all acting as one, might affect a single instance of mySQL running on what can only be considered a powerful workstation-class machine.


Thanks!

Sam