I honestly don't know. The forum isn't currently that busy, but it's an old modified WWWBoard system and probably isn't getting many uses for that reason. The entire site can get like 1400+ visits daily, and I'd be hoping to improve that with a restructure of the site.

2. What is the maximum reads per minute?
3. How many overall posts per day? (estimated growth rate)

Again, there's no way to estimate at this point how many reads or writes there will be.

4. How large do you expect the messages to be?

Most under 2K, some as large as 5K. I doubt we'll need more than that, though the capability should be there.

5. Is it a write once system, or will there be re-editing of messages?

Re-editing.

6. What is your hardware budget for the project, or is there fixed hardware?

Remote hosting account, with fixed hardware. Though if we had to, we could upgrade to us having the entire server to ourselves. That would only be if the site in general got a good deal more popular than it is now, however.

7. What is the required uptime?

I wouldn't want it down for more than 5 minutes a day, at most.

8. Are you going to have an internal search engine?

Yes.

9. If so, what sort of information are you going to search on? (metadata, or the message itself?)

Message itself. Ideally, the messages would be preprocessed to lowercase everything and remove unnecessary punctuation, and there'd be a small index for the most popular keywords. The search data doesn't have to be real-time - it can be generated every day or two, if necessary.

10. What are your disaster recovery requirements?

The site has regular daily backups as part of the hosting service, and we can get a restore if we destroy something by mistake.

11. Do you need to support transactional concurency?

I'm assuming there will only ever be one person editing or deleting a specific post. We might want to generate the threads as web pages, however (from accumulated post data), and these would need some form of locking / unlocking so that two people posting to a thread or editing a thread wouldn't conflict.

12. What are your time constraints?

At this point, none. I'm willing to spend a lot of time if necessary to get an efficient system going that will last a long time.

13. Do you already have a database to use for this purpose?

We have a mySQL database. I don't know what version of mySQL, however.

14. Do you already have experience with databases?

I've used mySQL a fair amount, though not much with Perl and never to store large amounts of text.