Agreed that vbulletin does use more queries on some pages than ubbthreads does. Not all I might add (compare
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/index.php?s= @ 29 queries with
https://www.ubbdev.com/threads/php/ubbthreads.php?Cat= @ 52.
However I would hope you would agree that the shere number of queries is not the most important thing when designing a forum system. 30 optomised queries can take less time than 1 badly written query. I think you will find that a lot of time has been spent on ensuring that the queries in vbulletin are optimal. An increase in the number of queries goes hand in hand with adding more features.
I believe a fix has just been released to let vbulletin run with register globals off. This will of course be something built into the next version of vbulletin.
Lastly, I don't actually know of any vbulletin board running on 3 servers, as it requires load balancing of apache it is not the easiest setup. Perhaps you can let me know who is running a 3 server config? And agreed that as you hit 500 concurrent users are you going to be getting to the point of needed a second server. I have never seen a ubbthreads forum with more than 100ish people online so couldn't comment on what happens when you get to this level of activity, perhaps you could let me know.
Lastly I think there is plenty of room for both forum products to exist and the typical ours is better than yours rubbish is rather tedious as we clearly all have our own opinions and that is great but please be careful what you say about other products and insure it is accurate.
