what is the best forum software

[Vanilla]

@Zack, congrats with the #1K post ;)

The server is of course the ultimate performance limiter when considering forum based software, but it's still worth to consider that the largest online forum right now (GAIA online w. almost 2 billion posts) is based on the PHPBB system architecture (although heavily modified, but having shared these modifications with the PHPBB community for later gradual implementation). The largest MyBB forum (It too is actually a heavily modified MyBB derivative, called NCAA Bulletin Board), which has around 5 million posts.

@Crystal, these wasn't my servers or my sites, it was a benchmark I once saw between PHPBB2 and MyBB 1.1.5, which showed that PhpBB was better at handling the mysql entries in overload situations that MyBB, but of course a lot have happened since 2006.

Anyway, basically, the speed differences between each forum software is so insignificant, that it would only matter if you ended up having millions of unique users on a laptop server, basically.