BUMP!
(yes I know this is an almost nine year old thread ;))
Years ago (before this thread was created) I asked Sam Bauers about how bbPress 0.9 compared to phpBB and he said that bbPress was slower by default, but as soon as you hooked up an object caching backend, that bbPress wooped phpBB quite easily.
But does anyone have an idea of how the “new” bbPress plugin compares to say phpBB performance wise? Logged out users are easily handled by caching, but what about the logged in folk? With some aggressive object caching, we can tank the number of queries to a minimum and it will run a ton faster, but I have no idea how this compares to the more “standard” forum tools.
And are there any tricks to making bbPress handle huge forums?
This is very old thread, but I just want to clarify something, as this keeps showing up in Google searches for this topic.
Technically WordPress could work out the post-type; it already does this in the case of posts and pages using the same URL structure. It is however faster if it knows the post-type in advance, hence bbPress prefers to use those slugs by default.
There is also a secondary problem, which is probably why there isn’t even a common hack to work around this problem, in that if you allow people to create topics and replies at the root level, there could easily be clashes between slugs. This isn’t such a big problem with posts and pages, as usually it’s only the blog admin/editor creating the posts, but in the case of a forum it would be very easy for a member of the public to inadvertently create a clashing slug. You could also ensure that forum posts didn’t clash with existing content in other post-types, but forum users could use page slugs which the admins may want to use for other posts in future. Basically, things get messy.
Having said all that, this should in theory be possible I think (I haven’t tried to figure out how yet, I’m just searching around to find an existing solution), there would just be a few potential drawbacks. If anyone knows how to do this, please post the solution for the rest of us to see 🙂
I only looked at the first link that you posted, and it seems to be using Reddis for caching static pages. That should work just as well for bbPress as it does for bbPress.
I assume that a good object caching setup would be more important to concentrate on for bbPress since many people will be logged in users and hence not see the statically cached pages anyway.
For what it’s worth, I use APC to handle both static page caching and object caching with bbPress. I haven’t experienced any problems with it. The sheer number of pages being cached did mean that I needed to adjust my cache refresh time however. When I added a new bbPress site to my server, it maxed out my APC RAM very quickly. Forums tend to have a lot more cacheable pages than a typical WordPress site and so keeping an eye on your RAM usage is quite important.
The current version of the Spam Destroyer plugin is not compatible with bbPress. I have prepared a beta version which seems to work well though. It doesn’t stop huge amounts of spam but I’m using it myself and it seems to be blocking about 99% of it.
http://geek.ryanhellyer.net/products/spam-destroyer/
Thanks 🙂 I look forward to hearing the results. If it doesn’t work for any reason, just let me know and I’ll look into it for you. In principle it should work, but I’ve done very little testing so it’s possible I’ve missed something on the bbPress implementation.
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 11 years, 9 months ago by
Ryan Hellyer.
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This reply was modified 11 years, 9 months ago by Ryan Hellyer.
It looks like they’ll be building an application for a weather station that will tie in with a WordPress powered website I run.
Using a cookie seems to be the approach used by vBulletin, and it’s pretty horrid as it doesn’t carry over between browsers.
IMO storing the users data per post would be too resource intensive with too many users. Storing the post data per user would be too resource intensive for users who didn’t visit often.
SMF seems to handle it fine. Not sure how they do it though.
I think I’ll avoid suggesting unread posts as an option for them. There’s way too many pitfalls I can see in implementing this. Best if someone with more knowledge tackles it I think or we’ll just end up with a horridly inefficient approach to a complex problem.
Thanks for the forum signature plugin link. I didn’t see that in the bbPress plugin repo. (maybe it’s not there?).
The BuddyPress avatar plugin seems like a good option for providing bbPress avatar support.
a avatar plugin for profile edit was also nice.
you can integrate a existing one for wordpress into bbpress profile or so?!
Do you know of any good existing ones for WordPress?
What about a plugin to add in forum signatures?
Most people seem to be moving towards using custom post-types for storing large chunks of data these days. But this data is person specific, so it might best stored as meta data connected to the users profile. I’m not sure exactly where that would be stored though.
That meta data could quite big too as you would need to store whether someone had looked at a LOT of posts in some situations. I guess you could make it conk out past a certain date though to stop the system overloading itself, or perhaps cap the meta data at a certain number of bytes perhaps …. hmmmm, maybe it is possible.
Not sure I have the time to delve into this sort of thing myself though, and since they’re new to this stuff I need to be able to hand hold them through a lot of it. If there’s an experienced bbPress coder out there willing to help, feel free to volunteer 
A helping hand from across the other side of the world could be a useful experience for them. Collaborating with people in other parts of the world could be a useful learning experience for them.
New tables are usually a bad option. That sort of data is usually much better off stored elsewhere. It’s not too bad in a single site install, but it really screws the pooch when you move to a multisite install and you have custom tables flying all over the place making a mess.
That would indeed be a very useful plugin!
Do you have any idea how you would go about building that? Off the top of my head, the only ways I can think of would be horridly inefficient and slow.
The only forum software I’ve seen do this correctly is SMF. Even phpBB and vBulletin both have crappy implementations of this functionality which don’t work very well. The SMF system is flawless and works perfectly everytime. Something similar for bbPress would be awesome.
It might be possible to hook into the template loader, see what the request is, and force it to look into a different folder, but there’s no possible way to do it at all with page templates; it’s actually purposely disallowed to prevent the theme from having to scan every file inside every subfolder to find them.
Minor technicality: This is actually technically possible with page templates. It’s just very awkward and involves a lot of side-stepping to achieve it. I looked into this for a project a while ago and came up with a really awkward way of doing it, and Otto came up with a much nicer solution, but both solutions were still pretty awful. Off the top of my head I can’t remember how either worked, but it was indeed possible. There’s a forum thread on WP Tavern about it somewhere – could be difficult to find though.
I’m surprised it didn’t work. The posts etc. should show up just fine I’d have thought, since they’re simply custom post-types which should work fine on multi-site. I’ll try installing it myself tomorrow perhaps and see if I can work out what’s up with it.
This would make managing my forums a lot easier if I can port them all to use multi-site. No more mucking around maintaining separate installs of everything, which I rarely update.
That’s something you would add via your bbPress theme files.
Have you guys been attempting this with subdomains or just folders on your multi-site installs?
This will be darn handy once we can use it on multi-site Actually, it’ll be darn handy before then too, but it’ll be super darn handy once we can use it on multi-site.
Is it possible that your original installation of standalone bbPress is messing things up?
That’s just a spit ball guess. I have minimal experience with BuddyPress and bbPress 2.0.
I’m just wondering if something might be left over and not removed correctly, and hence is interfering.
I doubt there will ever be a private messaging system specifically for bbPress 2.0. Since it is a WordPress plugin itself, it makes far more sense to make a private messaging plugin for WordPress, rather than bbPress specfically since they would presumably work in exactly the same way.
The BuddyPress route that JJJ suggested above seems like the best option to me. There’s probably a bit of extra junk you need to load in the process, but BuddyPress is a known and well developed product so you at least know it will work well and won’t be riddled with security holes which was a problem with the original bbPress private messaging plugins.
This ia big THANKS for the ninja-awesome inline documentation. It makes reading the plugin files significantly easier
Also, I see above that there may be an alpha released in the next week or two. Do you think that would be suitable for running on a live site? I’m not adverse to having to fix bugs and problems here and there, so long as I don’t find myself stuck eternally on some old version without a semi-easy upgrade path. I don’t mind minor upgrades on upgrading, templates malfunctioning etc., but losing usernames, passwords and/or posts/topics would be quite disastrous.
I’m contemplating launching a forum within the next month and would rather use some semi-dicey alpha software than having to use one software for a few months, then upgrading to bbPress once it’s more stable.
I suspect there will be a mad rush of people porting those over to the new plugin. I’d expect a few phpBB themes to make their way over too I’d suspect.
Justin Tadlock’s plugin does allow front-end editing. It just forces you to use the WordPress admin panel if you don’t have JS running. Having said that, I’d much rather see that improved in the future so that front-end editing was possible without JS on. I assume Justin is working on that though.
@wtfmatt2 – Please bug off and stop ranting. Either that or articulate your responses into a respectful manner. Matt and co. are doing their best. Ranting and whining is achieving nothing more than making you look like a complete tool.
Why do the powers that be not see reason in what _CK_ says above?
Justin Tadlock’s forum plugin avoids these problems. Why can’t the new Automattic created one too?
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/07/16/a-wordpress-forum-plugin-using-custom-post-types
