bbPress.org

I’ve narrowed this down to the fact that it seems to be an issue with the display of subforums on the main forum index page. We have quite a few subforums so generating the list of forums and subforms takes a long time.

I can’t easily cache this page because different logged in users see different forums based upon permissions. I would think that some of this would be handled with object caching, but this performance is horrendous compared to our previous vbulletin install. I love many of the features of bbpress, but having users wait four to ten seconds for a page load isn’t a good experience.

Any suggestions on how I might improve performance (other than not displaying subforums on the home forums page)? I’m using xcache and have W3 Total Cache with object caching enabled.

Hey folks thanks for responding — appreciate you checking in, Stephen E.

I’m going to do some testing on the live site over the holiday weekend (lower traffic and all) to try and debug this so I have more concrete information. The site is private, but I’m more than happy to provide a login if you’d like to check after I do some more trouble shooting.

We do have some users with quite a few forums visible on forum home due to how long they have been members. It can be a low of 10 — up to around 80 for our longtime members. The only data we show for each forum on the forum home is the forum name and freshness…

I’ll report back next week — thanks again for the followups

Following up with research complete….New Relic is really awesome for this type of stuff.

It does come down for the most part to the quantity of the forums/sub-forums. Most of the time spent was in the template calls for each sub-forum. However, it also appears a bit of the additional time is due to the Groups plugin which makes the SQL query a bit more complex.

So I’ve decided to set my home page to be a view of recent topics (which, frankly, is a bit better anyway because it shows more activity of interest) and the performance is going to be much better for members.

However, one hitch here is that I’d like to have a “forum home-like” page available for view for those that want it. With an additional requirement that it is under the /forums/ URL ‘subdirectory’ (due to various robot rules, etc). In other words, something like /forums/all or /forums/views/all . I can’t use the bbpress shortcode for a page because I can’t put the page under the /forums/ subdirectory. I looked into using views, but that doesn’t seem to work either.

I’m probably missing something obvious (and I’ve done considerable googling), but it’s not seeming to be as easy as it sounds. Probably should start another thread…

Thanks again for the insights…