[pyronaught]

So I put two versions of my forum up on two different live sites: one hosted by IIS server running on Windows and one hosted by Apache running on Linux. Apache beat IIS hands down, it wasn’t even close on page load times. So it’s bye-bye Microsoft for me, LAMP is the way to go for speedy page loads.

So just don’t run bbPress on an IIS site and the speed is acceptable.

[pyronaught]

Good question, too bad nobody answered it. I was wondering the exact same thing. Why would there not be an importer for the most current release of bbPress? Doesn’t make any sense.

[pyronaught]

I should mention I’m developing on Webmatrix, so IIS is the server. The hosted link above is also running on IIS. Would Apache run the site faster?

[pyronaught]

Here’s another performance profiler that is useful: https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/

Not as detailed as the Query Monitor, but it does give you a view of which plugins are hogging the most time. bbPress is at the top of the time-hog list on my application, which is not surprising given that it has to deal with the most data.

[pyronaught]

That’s an interesting tool too, although it didn’t give me much advice that I am able to do anything about other than turning off plugins that were not being used. I did upload a copy of the forum to a test site so see if there was any difference compared to running it locally. It’s about the same really. I don’t know how this forum here is so fast, if I could get mine to be this fast I’d be happy. The whole site just seems sluggish, even the pages without the forum on it.

http://www.sky-disc.com/forums/

Most of that forum is private, but I opened up the Stuff For Sale section for testing without an account.

[pyronaught]

Wow, that’s a pretty cool tool you linked to, thanks! I was trying to do a similar thing with MySQL Workbench, but that plugin is way better.

The report is pretty huge, so here’s just the top part with the two slowest queries. These two forum queries really only account for .35 seconds combined, but there are a little over 200 other queries that pile on to bring the total query time to 1.02 secs, which still doesn’t seem bad really. So I guess something other than queries is adding another 2 seconds. I was surprised to see 200 queries though, I had no idea that much was going on with the database. I had one page with nothing on it but a site map and it showed like 8000 queries! WTF? Talk about death by a thousand cuts. Anyway, here’s the info:

Performance
3.15S 28.61MB 1.0261S 193Q

3.1452
1.3% of 240s limit 29,292 kB
2.8% of 1,048,576 kB limit 1.0261 SELECT: 187
UPDATE: 4
SHOW: 2

Slow Database Queries (above 0.05s)

Query

Caller

Time

SELECT wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts
WHERE 1=1
AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘reply’
AND ((wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’
OR wp_posts.post_status = ‘closed’))
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 5
WP_Query->get_posts+

0.2070

SELECT post_status, COUNT( * ) AS num_posts
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_type = ‘reply’
GROUP BY post_status
wp_count_posts+

0.1460

[pyronaught]

A lot of the image attachment plugins are pretty limited. The one I’m using that covers the bare minimum requirements is called “bbPress Multi Image Uploader.” It at least lets you see the images you have uploaded when you go back and edit the message.

[pyronaught]

I removed all widgets from the side bar just in case they were effecting page load times, but they had minimal effect. I’m getting average page load times of 3 seconds consistently no matter what part of the forum I’m viewing. Put the site on a server somewhere and get a bunch of users hitting it at the same time and that number is only going to get worse.

I’m also running the free version of W3 Total Cache and do not notice any difference than running without it. I don’t think it caches the forum pages though, probably for good reason.

[pyronaught]

I just ported a Dot Net Nuke site to Word Press and migrated the Active Forums forum to bbPress. This is a forum that only has 4000 uers, 20K topics and 200K replies. Even running locally with no other users it is very sluggish running on bbPress. Other related plugins I’m running that might effect speed are WP eMembers, bbPress Multi Image Uploader and bbPress Pencil Unread. I still need to add a plugin for signatures and probably another one for statistics. But the bottom line is I should be getting snappy response times when clicking on forums and topics on a locally staged site with a forum of this size and no other concurrent users, but I’m not.

A lot of reviews assume bbPress should be fast due to being “lightweight,” but I think database design has more to do with speed. The big problem I see with bbPress is that they are piling ALL data into a single wp_posts table, where a lot of other word press plugins also seem to like to pile their data into. While most forum software have separate tables for forums, topics, replies and attachments in order to minimize the amount of data that has to be sifted through on each query, bbPress just puts them all in one giant table and then uses post_type to sort them out. There are also no stored procedures or views being used to help optimize performance. So it is really no surprise that it is as slow as it is. Why on earth the designers chose to just glom onto an existing WP table intended for blog posts instead of using separate purpose-built tables is beyond me, but I would be very leery of running any large forums on this thing. I would also be very surprised if version 2.6 makes it any faster.