GoandKnow,

I have about 78,000 users in Dolphin (Amistad.com). As far as number of users I do not think there is a problem with Dolphin. The problem is that users can NOT be very friendly at the moment ... hehe.

If they can find a way of optimizing this query, I believe this could scale up fairly large. I believe it has been an oversight ... that can be fixed fairly quickly. The problem with the left join is that I believe it creates a temporary file every time it executes, therefore is see more very slow.

Besides that, there are several ways to scale up Dolphin. You can always run the database (mysql) on a separate server and optimize that server just for SQL. Then you can cluster the website and even the database .. might require some ingenious changes to duplicate music, videos.. etc .. but perhaps those could even be served from a third server.

I am NOT giving up yet on Dolphin ... I think it has a lot of potential. Now, I do believe that they should concentrate on fixing bugs and making it stable and faster, and forget about new features for now.

For the moment, think of Dolphin as the base to build a social network ... not the complete solution. You will need to put some good hours to make it work right.

Again, if anybody wants to email me.... richarddib (at) Mac . com :-)