WordPress itself can handle load fairly well, and is fairly optimized. The question is how well does bbPress handle millions of posts.
Any DB can struggle with a table with millions of rows, depending on the hardware you throw at it. My main concern with bbPress in such an environment is that all WordPress posts themselves share the same table as bbPress 2.x, since it uses custom posts types.
You might be better off using a separate forum on a separate DB from a performance impact, but you lose the integration of WordPress user accounts that you get with bbPress.
The other point to consider is that since bbPress is relatively simplistic forum software (that’s not meant as a slam, it just isn’t as feature rich as IPB, phpbb, etc), there may be fewer SQL queries per page load with bbPress.
When you start storing that much data, it becomes less about volume and more about server setup and performance. MySQL databases can hold billions or records efficiently, WordPress can read and write to that database easily, too. What will matter is how you spread the pain of your traffic and volume around.
Thanks for answers guys.
@enderandrew Yes that’s the problem for me – I am going to have some other large WordPress project which I’d like to be integrated with this new forum very closely. That’s why I think about bbPress.
@John Yes WordPress itself is very scalable to start with Mashable and with itself WP.COM and it’s really all about optimization, traffic handling, hardware, etc. But which one will need more working on all these options – professional forum such as IPB ro vBulletin or bbPress?
Can’t speak for the others; if scalability into the billions of posts is really your concern: at volume, the platform matters significantly less than the operators and system administrators keeping up with the growth. Most of your static content will be served directly from the cache, and there’s not much you can do about database writes; they have to happen anyways.
If what you’re looking for is for someone to tell you that bbPress will out-perform some other platform is some specific way, I think you’re on your own. What I can tell you is that bbPress very much is in active development, and is optimized to use all of WordPress’s cacheing API’s, with constant efforts specifically going into further optimization in future versions.
Not into the millions here, but I just migrated over about 140k posts and 40k tag relationships last night.
So far, nothing is on fire yet!
My two cents worth … bearing in mind that I don’t actually use bbPress at the moment so this is all theoretical, so treat my opinion accordingly …
I migrated a site with around 250,000 posts a while back, and the only thing I had trouble with was the import script timing out, but that’s an easily fixable bottleneck.
I think the main problem you might stumble across, is that WordPress isn’t that good at handling dynamic content IMO and so the server load may become a problem with lots of activity on your forum. Most sites are static, therefore you can cache the heck out of them, forums not so much.
Personally, I’d still use bbPress even for a fairly large forum though. I know WordPress better than anything else, and so I’d be more comfortable scaling bbPress to high traffic volumes than I would any other platform. My suspicion is that many other dedicated forum packages could theoretically handle a lot more load though, since they’re (theoretically) architected to handle dynamic content better than WordPress.
PS: Kudos to whoever’s been working on this site in the past 12 months. I haven’t been here in a while and it sure does look a lot better 🙂
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This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
Ryan Hellyer.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Ryan Hellyer.
Thanks for the thread netweb my concern is definitely performance number one. But point well taken optimization is always first and foremost no matter what size the site is.
I had to ask because there are so many articles and threads on how to accomplish the multi-login scenario none of them are without issues. I’m really not looking to complicate or increase my workload.
You made some real valid points and have helped narrow down my decision making a whole bunch. I have found that keeping things as simple as we can really works out for the best in the long run in most cases.
Rock on with the bbpress project, I love my phpbb, been using them for 10 years. It’s time to try something new. I do like its simplicity and it’s come a long way from almost a year ago when I looked at it.
Thanks for your time and help
