I have some data saved as post meta, occasionally some plugins may save an extra piece. Now I installed bbpress, it saves at least 10 pieces of post meta. Adding them together, there are nearly 35 pieces of post meta per post. I think WordPress can handle much more if without bbpress.
With bbpress forum, the number of posts will increase dramatically, multiply by the number of post meta, it will be a huge post meta table. Will it be a problem?
No, to be honest 35 is nothing. You should not see any problems scaling this into the hundreds/thousands if optimized right, it does depend on many factors.
Where is the post meta being used, are you sure it’s all being used?
Are you using a lot of unique keys? You can check this by doing
get_post_custom_keys, the lower the better.Are you outputting all post meta in one shot using
get_post_custominstead of getting each field viaget_post_meta?You should always turn on debugging with
define('SAVEQUERIES', true);and see how many hits to the DB your doing and how long each one is taking.