bbPress support forums Topic: Question about rendering time

bbPress support forums Topic: Question about rendering time http://bbpress.org/forums/ bbPress support forums Topic: Question about rendering time en Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:12:16 +0000 HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10280 Sun, 19 Aug 2007 04:57:10 +0000 HowToGeek 10280@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Yeah, all other forums do a "diff" patch approach to creating mods, which is the main thing that drove me to use bbPress in the first place... the plugin architecture is so much simpler. I really like the idea of making "pluggable" actions the way bbPress does, but I'm not entirely fond of the filters. In most cases I don't use the filters in my theme, but change the theme to directly output the data. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10278 Sun, 19 Aug 2007 03:03:36 +0000 _ck_ 10278@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I've discovered another interesting approach that SMF takes - their "plugins" are actually true mods where it's a sort of "diff" file that patches the sources. Keeps it running very fast no matter how make addons you use. To a certain degree it keeps working between minor version changes (ie. 1.1.1-1.1.3) but major changes will break many of them. Still, it's an interesting approach and very different to bbPress. They also do virtually everything in memory as arrays (roles, etc) where bbPress runs through a big bunch of code to return a value ie. bb_current_user_can("administrate"). I know wordpress.org's forum has distributed backup servers but it operates as a single server correct? I'm wondering just how far bbpress can scale on a single server. Once you offload mysql & email functions, that's about as far as you can go easily on a single server. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10259 Sat, 18 Aug 2007 10:34:00 +0000 _ck_ 10259@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I finally found one weakness in SMF (took awhile!) No tags/category support and no hacks/mods in sight to add the ability.. Of course few other forums have such an ability. I've been setting up a new SMF forum for a client just to learn it and they gave me a list of sub-forums they wanted - I was like this would have been perfect for bbpress, instead of sub-forums which are unnecessary in their case and will confusing visitors. (ie. "photos" sub-forum which really, could be photos in any other forum, just tagged to show a topic has a photo) HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10257 Sat, 18 Aug 2007 05:28:24 +0000 HowToGeek 10257@http://bbpress.org/forums/ That doesn't seem too difficult to believe, I ran bbpress through phped profiler and it looks like the templating makes it slightly slower than if you directly outputted the code like most other forums do. Which does make sense... what I've been considering is making a theme that doesn't use all the filters but directly outputs the data. That theme author should seriously consider moderating his forum... there's nothing but spam on it. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10254 Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:14:20 +0000 _ck_ 10254@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I built a SMF forum on a litespeed server yesterday and I sometimes get 0.023 page render times - it's some crazy stuff. I didn't even think numbers that low were possible. SMF seems heavy in some areas but it's completely geared for quick output. I think it's only weakness is that it will always look a certain blocky style - but it gets the job done for any big forum requirements. Lots of mods and themes available too. And you can set it up in under 30 minutes, under 10 minutes if you've done it before. I'd like to see bbpress grow up to be something like that. At some point I want to port this style to bbpress: <a href="http://www.harzem.com/themes/preview/index.php?theme=6" rel="nofollow">http://www.harzem.com/themes/preview/index.php?theme=6</a> Pretty sure it can be done (that's the theme author's site) HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time/page/2#post-10236 Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:33:13 +0000 HowToGeek 10236@http://bbpress.org/forums/ You should put up a donate button on your page... or just get really familiar with vim =) I'm thinking that 0.05 seconds to render a page is really quite good for most sites... I can't seem to find a big forum that includes the render time in the page source. What I've been thinking about, however, is that a customizable caching plugin would be really useful, especially for the really old posts that are mostly viewed via a google search. Been reading through the wp-cache2 source to see if there's really all that much to it. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10235 Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:15:23 +0000 _ck_ 10235@http://bbpress.org/forums/ No "fastload" is not very useful for servers with a proper opcode cache and responsive disk system (and files are fetched and rendered on the same node). On my VPS it actually adds a few ms on average. The load on dreamhost has been over 20 for most of today so it's not surprising anyone will find the bbpress+smf test sites slow. I'm probably going to switch the showcase back to nearlyfreespeech shortly which is still on the slower side and uses only http 1.0 as it's forces though a squid proxy. Unless someone can find a $20 or less per year host that has a better setup as my budget is maxed out. Can't even afford to replace my mouse that's acting up right now. HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10231 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:04:33 +0000 HowToGeek 10231@http://bbpress.org/forums/ They are both slower than all hell for me. I'm very interested in your fastload plugin... but I wonder if it would matter much for opcode cached sites. Seems like the majority of the problems in speed I'm getting are from the repeated hooks in tight loops. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10223 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:13:57 +0000 _ck_ 10223@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I've never seen their mysql take longer than 16-20ms to connect and never, ever more than 100ms to load all the queries. Storing code in mysql is crazy but just may work in weird cases like that. Of course if 1000 people did it, they'd ban the technique. What's really interesting is their microtime never gives accurate results and frequently negative numbers. Either their multi-cores have clocks that are out of sync or parts of the code are somehow executing on different servers???? I posted a question about it on their support forum and it was mysteriously deleted the next day. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10222 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:11:49 +0000 _ck_ 10222@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Feel free to play with page load times: <a href="http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/forums/" rel="nofollow">http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/forums/</a> vs. <a href="http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/smf/" rel="nofollow">http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/smf/</a> The server is absolutely crawling right now so it's a great time to see how bad each one is. With "fastload" bbpress is respectable against smf. I've unblocked the hidden bb-benchmarks so any user can see them if you do a view source and scroll to the bottom if you want to see all the stats. sambauers on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10221 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:10:46 +0000 sambauers 10221@http://bbpress.org/forums/ > I have this clever little idea to trick dreamhost by storing the "fastload" plugins and includes as mysql blobs and using eval. Their mysql stays consistently fast. Eeeek! Let us know how that goes, I've never found any aspect of Dreamhost "fast", cheap - yes, roomy - yes, fast - no. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10220 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:03:09 +0000 _ck_ 10220@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Yeah I've seem some really interesting hosting methods by running bbpress on several cheap shared hosts just to see how it behaves. SMF still freaks me out though. Then again they have like 5 years of development or much more if you include YaBB experience. I have this clever little idea to trick dreamhost by storing the "fastload" plugins and includes as mysql blobs and using eval. Their mysql stays consistently fast. sambauers on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10219 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:02:40 +0000 sambauers 10219@http://bbpress.org/forums/ You could probably drop the deprecated functions altogether. Would save a few milliseconds. sambauers on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10218 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:59:16 +0000 sambauers 10218@http://bbpress.org/forums/ File system hits are particularly bad on Dreamhost because from what I can tell the user home directories are actually based on file servers that are separate to the machine running apache. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10217 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:56:29 +0000 _ck_ 10217@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I've reduced the number of files included to: <pre><code>=== executed files === /index.php : 0.44 Kb /bb-load.php : 0.46 Kb /config.php : 2.28 Kb /bb-settings.php : 7.49 Kb /bb-includes/db-mysqli.php : 12.77 Kb /my-plugins/fastload-includes.php : 298.75 Kb /my-plugins/fastload-plugins.php : 93.66 Kb /bb-includes/pluggable.php : 8.86 Kb /bb-includes/locale.php : 6.91 Kb /bb-templates/kakumei/front-page.php : 3.03 Kb /bb-templates/kakumei/header.php : 1.6 Kb /bb-templates/kakumei/logged-in.php : 0.21 Kb /bb-templates/kakumei/footer.php : 1.13 Kb ==================================================</code></pre> With a little work I could make pluggable & locale include properly too. sambauers on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10216 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:54:12 +0000 sambauers 10216@http://bbpress.org/forums/ SMF is even smaller than that because a lot of the content in those files is comments. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10215 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:53:34 +0000 _ck_ 10215@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Well every millisecond on the output does matter and the reasons you listed are very valid, but on heavily loaded servers, I have to believe the biggest weakness is the sheer number of files that have to seek and load. If they aren't in the server's file cache (dreamhost might have 1000 virtual hosts per node or more) that can cause long delays. Even if using an opcode cache, the cache still has to check the file date/size in the OS before it allows execution. But even bbpress's output template requires 3+ files to be included. SMF does it entirely differently in one single file. I've built a prototype "fastload" plugin that concatinates two pools of files: 1. includes (except a few outside the general block in bb-settings) 2. all plugins It actually works to some degree to speed things up on dreamhost when they are are at insane loads. By reducing the number of files to seek from 40 to less than 10 the page load times are much better. sambauers on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10212 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:44:57 +0000 sambauers 10212@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Here are a couple of other reasons why SMF might be faster. * SMF doesn't use php-gettext for translation, it uses an array of text that can be replaced. This method approaches the speed of a native gettext implementation. * bbPress has a lot of functions to register. * SMF has (auto-detecting) built in support for memcached, eAccelerator, MMCache, AlternativePHP Cache and the Zend Optimiser * Most (all?) of SMF is written inside PHP, i.e. the HTML is in strings that are echoed out of PHP, this is slightly quicker than dropping in and out of PHP to output to the browser. * Many bbPress plugins don't need to load on every page, they could start with some sort of conditional that requests the current bbPress location and then just send a "return" when they aren't required. That's all I can think of after a quick look. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10209 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:52:29 +0000 _ck_ 10209@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Ah, here's SMF's secret against bbPress - sheer number of files + size. This definitely makes me want to go ahead with making a "quick loader" that will concat all the includes and then all the plugins as two blobs that can be either loaded from disk or mysql at user discretion based on the weakness of their shared server: Front pages compared: (keep in mind SMF actually has even more features than the dozen plugins loaded with bbPress, online user tracker, etc) <pre><code>SMF 1.1.3 files for front page: 8 files, 338.45 Kb index.php : 14.31 Kb Settings.php : 3.71 Kb Sources/QueryString.php : 18.84 Kb Sources/Subs.php : 132.37 Kb Sources/Errors.php : 15.94 Kb Sources/Load.php : 92.47 Kb Sources/Security.php : 29.88 Kb Sources/MessageIndex.php : 30.93 Kb =====================================================</code></pre> ` bbPress 0.8.3 alpha files for front page: 40 files, 437.15 Kb index.php : 0.44 Kb bb-load.php : 0.46 Kb config.php : 2.28 Kb bb-settings.php : 7.14 Kb bb-includes/db-mysqli.php : 12.77 Kb bb-includes/functions.php : 71.73 Kb bb-includes/wp-classes.php : 3.37 Kb bb-includes/classes.php : 37.98 Kb bb-includes/formatting-functions.php : 8.73 Kb bb-includes/template-functions.php : 59.12 Kb bb-includes/capabilities.php : 13.15 Kb bb-includes/cache.php : 8.52 Kb bb-includes/deprecated.php : 8.17 Kb bb-includes/wp-functions.php : 36.06 Kb bb-includes/kses.php : 17.65 Kb bb-includes/l10n.php : 1.76 Kb bb-includes/bozo.php : 10.1 Kb bb-includes/akismet.php : 8.14 Kb bb-includes/default-filters.php : 4.45 Kb bb-includes/script-loader.php : 9.2 Kb bb-includes/compat.php : 0.57 Kb my-plugins/_bb-benchmark.php : 4.79 Kb my-plugins/_cookie-year.php : 0.92 Kb my-plugins/bb-polls.php : 21.04 Kb my-plugins/bb-signatures.php : 11.52 Kb my-plugins/report-post.php : 3.92 Kb my-plugins/user-topics-to-favorites.php : 0.59 Kb my-plugins/bb-topic-views.php : 5.91 Kb my-plugins/my-views.php : 10.13 Kb my-plugins/notification.php : 2.26 Kb my-plugins/my-views-started-participated-topics.php : 1.52 Kb my-plugins/my-views-most-least-views.php : 2.7 Kb my-plugins/plugin-browser.php : 21.72 Kb my-plugins/my-views-installed-available-plugins.php : 6.61 Kb bb-includes/pluggable.php : 8.86 Kb bb-includes/locale.php : 6.91 Kb bb-templates/kakumei/front-page.php : 3.03 Kb bb-templates/kakumei/header.php : 1.6 Kb bb-templates/kakumei/logged-in.php : 0.21 Kb bb-templates/kakumei/footer.php : 1.13 Kb ===================================================== <code></code> _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10207 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:39:17 +0000 _ck_ 10207@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I just installed SMF on the my dreamhost account next to bbpress. SMF blows away bbpress's performance, every time. I have to investigate how the heck they do that. It feels like they are using partial page caching but their performance stats say they are using the same number of queries. Then again I know bbpress's weakness is not the queries, it's all those plugins getting included and then firing up when the filters/actions first trigger. Bugs the heck out of me. bbPress should be as fast! _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10204 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:02:46 +0000 _ck_ 10204@http://bbpress.org/forums/ eaccellerator and xcache are derived from the same original core - eaccellerator is a tad slower than both xcache and apc, but it also has the fewest problems and fewest incompatibilities compared to both. I believe it also has several people working on it, unlike xcache which means the project doesn't grind to a halt when one person becomes distracted. No opcode cache project can in theory leapfrog in performance over another, it's just little tweaks here and there. The big secret is replacing Apache with LiteSpeed or if you really have alot of time on your hands and don't need virtual hosts, Lighttpd. Apache is very inefficient, especially running PHP. HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10195 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:48:01 +0000 HowToGeek 10195@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Sweet stats there.... I'm still working on trimming some time off the page loads. Yeah, MediaTemple's best dedicated virtual server is $150 / month, and that's what I'm using. I don't pay that much because I'm in their partner program, but I wouldn't mind paying it to make sure that my site is fast enough. I'm really quite happy with them. I'll be very interested to see what you come up with on the eaccellerator front... I've been considering switching from xcache to that. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10192 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:12:29 +0000 _ck_ 10192@http://bbpress.org/forums/ That's exactly right about Dreamhost. I am working on a technique to try to load all the bbpress includes and plugins directly from the eaccelerator memcache instead of seeking on the disk first to check if they have changed (and just let the mysql plugins registry manage that). I suspect I can eliminate the 400ms lag if I can pull that off. Not an easy feat though. Requires a replacement bb-settings.php Oh and you're probably paying per month for your dedicated what I pay per year for my VPS (I've migrated twice to get better neighbors): <pre><code>=== benchmark & query results === 12:08:28 up 25 days, 3:37, 0 users, load average: 0.07, 0.04, 0.00 total page time: 0.045 seconds. time to reach each section: bb_underscore_plugins_loaded = 0.005 bb-polls.php loaded = 0.005 bb-signatures.php loaded = 0.005 report-post.php loaded = 0.006 my-views.php loaded = 0.006 bb-topic-views.php loaded = 0.006 user-topics-to-favorites.php loaded = 0.006 admin-post-anything.php loaded = 0.006 tweaks.php loaded = 0.006 my-views-most-least-views.php loaded = 0.007 my-views-started-participated-topics.php loaded = 0.008 my-views-installed-available-plugins.php loaded = 0.008 ignore-member.php loaded = 0.009 bb_plugins_loaded = 0.009 bb_init = 0.011 bb_index.php_pre_db = 0.011 bb_index.php = 0.016 front-page.php = 0.016 header.php = 0.017 logged-in.php = 0.018 footer.php = 0.045 time to render page: 0.0429 seconds (query time subtracted) total query count: 12 total query time: 0.0021 seconds slowest call was # 1 : 0.0005 seconds SELECT * FROM bb_forums LIMIT 1 server:dbh_local connect: 0.38ms</code></pre> HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10190 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:39:36 +0000 HowToGeek 10190@http://bbpress.org/forums/ With dreamhost, it really depends on what server you end up on, and what time of the day. If you are lucky enough to get on a decent server without too many others, then you'll have fast performance, or at least tolerable. I couldn't live without the VPS... and to answer your question way above somewhere, it's 1GB dedicated. Mediatemple is great. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10184 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:20:23 +0000 _ck_ 10184@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Yeah dreamhost certainly does suck. I just have a $20 per year promo account that I completely forgot about until recently when I wanted to test bbpress on various hosts (I'm looking for other super cheap hosts to try it on if you know of any, especially pay-as-you go like nearlyfreespeech.net) What's really strange is that some other forum software works MUCH faster on dreamhost and I am trying to figure out why. Take a look at WP plugin author GamerZ's SMF (simple machines forum, evolved from YaBB) which is on another Dreamhost node: <a href="http://forums.lesterchan.net" rel="nofollow">http://forums.lesterchan.net</a> It's incredibly responsive. Not even running an opcode cache. Of course SMF has half a decade of development behind it, but still, it's impressive. I suspect they use partial page caching somehow. Meanwhile <a href="http://lesterchan.net/">GamerZ's WP blog</a> running on the same account, crawls at times. HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10183 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 03:47:16 +0000 HowToGeek 10183@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Thanks for that... good thought. I changed it to ob_start(null,8192) instead of using the 4096 value you were using in the plugin. I noticed that when I had it set to 4096, I was still getting the really slow page render time for some reason, but 8192 works perfectly. I think I've mentioned it before, but you rule =) Oh, and dreamhost sucks. _ck_ on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10182 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:25:56 +0000 _ck_ 10182@http://bbpress.org/forums/ Note that microtime is off by at least 15ms on every call by nature, sometimes more depending what the cpu is doing and if you have a multiple core cpu. Sometimes the core clocks can be out of sync! (This is the problem on Dreamhost I believe) By the way, make sure you notice the new benchmark.php starts with an underscore and delete the old one. But if you are done benchmarking you should delete it altogether or the underscore version will auto-load. The underscore was necessary so it could time the other benchmarks as it loaded before it. It's well known in any programming language that constant little echos to the output are much less efficient than buffering and outputting it all at the end. So that's something like what you were running into. If you use ob_start permanently, make sure you add the second optional chunked output option so the visitor gets periodic output from it, otherwise they won't see anything until the entire page is flushed. Visually (and mentally) it's more rewarding to start seeing some kind of page render the moment you click on something. (my bb-gzip plugin enforces the chunked output option if you want to see it in action - note that certain server options will de-chunk the output however and ruin the effect like mod_gzip and most proxy caches like squid) HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10180 Tue, 14 Aug 2007 23:23:59 +0000 HowToGeek 10180@http://bbpress.org/forums/ I think I figured it out... I added my own timing mechanism to virtually every line of code on the front page, and noticed the extra 0.2 seconds was occurring at random places... So I put ob_start(); at the beginning of bb-settings.php to turn on output buffering, and now here's the times I get with like 16 plugins installed, logged in as admin with a ton of custom stuff going on and everything is opcached: total page time: 0.078 seconds. time to reach each section: bb_underscore_plugins_loaded = 0.018 bb_plugins_loaded = 0.021 bb_init = 0.021 bb_index.php_pre_db = 0.024 front-page.php = 0.025 header.php = 0.025 logged-in.php = 0.026 search-form.php = 0.035 footer.php = 0.078 Now that is more like it! Now to remove all my logging.... And thanks for that benchmark plugin... it's great, I can't live without it now =) HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10178 Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:03:10 +0000 HowToGeek 10178@http://bbpress.org/forums/ After doing some more research, the plugin loading time is virtually instant when you an opcode cache. I added separate timestamp logging which shows that all the plugins are loaded at 0.019 but the bb_plugins_loaded action doesn't get fired until 0.1 seconds later. bb-benchmark.php loaded = 0.019 bb_underscore_plugins_loaded = 0.019 bb_plugins_loaded = 0.102 bb_init = 0.103 bb_index.php_pre_db = 0.106 front-page.php = 0.106 header.php = 0.107 logged-in.php = 0.107 search-form.php = 0.116 footer.php = 0.302 The majority of the time is taken between search form and footer.... I'm not sure yet what gets executed between them. HowToGeek on "Question about rendering time" http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/question-about-rendering-time#post-10177 Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:09:28 +0000 HowToGeek 10177@http://bbpress.org/forums/ This is interesting... because bbpress loads the plugins in order, the bb-benchmark plugin is getting loaded nearly last on my system, so I only see the output from the onlinelist plugin. It looks like the vast majority of the execution time is before the plugins even get loaded.