Open Source or Commercial WWWBoard Software?

BluSkreen asks: "I've got a site that runs Matt's WWWBoard, with most of the available mods added, the counter file lock sub routine, and most of the other hacks various people have done. The site regularly serves 60,000 plus requests a day, sometimes more. There are generally 100 or so posts a day. The last two months we have served about a million pages a month." The gist of it is that he's now having problems and looking for alternatives. Click below for more.

"Aside from the security concerns of the script, we are having problems with the script supporting that many users (up to 30 to 50 concurent, during peak times). During peak times, we can get 3 to 6 requests a second, which is fine for veiwing static pages with our configuration, but when multiple people try to post, the script can't support it. It sits on a T-1 all by itself on a Cobalt RAQ2, with 256 MB RAM. I like the "slash" package, but I've not been able to make it run on the RAQ2 just yet.

I'd like to "Ask Slashdot", what software/ hardware combination would you recommend? Is there a way to modify Slash so that the main articles are generated by the users, instead of submitted by the moderators? And lastly, has anyone been able to get Slash to run on a Cobalt box."

Anyone have other alternatives for WWWBoard software? I'm sure there are plenty out there, but how well do these packages work (especially under heavy loads)?