How much server resource use does your forum use in a month?
If we're talking server resources, that's one thing.
Sometimes, I like to spin up instances and go full throttle on the CPU (I'm paying for it, so why not use it?). I've done heavy processing but capped it at 80% CPU so that it wouldn't bog down the instance enough where I couldn't get to the process to kill it (say, if it weren't doing what I expected). An example of this was a recent project of mine
This is a project (pardon me for the poor redaction for privacy) that did a user linguistics matrix.
It compared each post they made on the forum against their own and another user's (11 total). So, 1 post would be compared to 10 other users' posts. It was limited to, I believe, 250 posts that were in the range of 10-500 words, so that there could be a somewhat equal comparison made. Scoring 100 from A to J would show you that harsh is definitively by harsh, while if you went to compare harsh (A) to user (I), the score presumably should drop, and does.
This takes a lot of computing power to do, even from loading in the text to process from memory (instead of reading files or a database for comparison).
I couldn't get it quite where I wanted it to be using PHP, and found Python to have better libraries to assist in writing matrixes like this. So, I will pick up work on this again.
What I can say is that it was good enough to determine whether there was a duplicate account with up to around 70% accuracy (either that or using the same tools to write with).
Websites take very little processing power/memory, unless we're adding in the use of applications like Elasticsearch for XenForo, which takes 1/2 my memory.
