[_ck_]

Unless performance is crippling slow, those users’ arguments are very valid.

bbPress’s ability to be customized and slipped into foreign environments is extremely attractive. It’s incredibly easy to customize without breaking the core like most other forums.

But look at WordPress – it’s popularity defies ALL logic. Without heavy duty caching it would collapse most large sites. Apachebench would DESTROY it without page caching (using 17 categories with 7500 users and 10k posts with 10k comments). Of course it’s the sheer number of available customizations that override the care about lack of performance.

[_ck_]

Oh come on, the average person who looks at a graph that says product B is slower than product A doesn’t know how to be critical about the testing methods. If they did, every other commercial you see on TV would be useless.

Making a benchmark is a learning process. I am certainly not critical of the effort, I think it’s great someone took the time to do it. All I am saying the concept can be improved and expanded.

Early on I wrote bb-benchmark to analyze how bbPress performs from the server-side. It can be very helpful. But as fancy as the analysis is, in the end something I wrote much later on that gives much simpler data is far more practical for real-world results (browser-timer).

AB could be considered the parallel of bb-benchmark. It has it’s usefulness.

But one day there will be something more real-world like browser-timer.

[_ck_]

Of course it will be good to have content caching added, I already commented on how plugins can do that and bbPress never got content caching because it was being re-invented every couple of years. The reality is now it’s a moot point, bbPress 0.9 and 1.0-1.1 will never have it internally. I doubt 1.2/2.0 will ever either, they will simply rely on WP plugins to do page caching.

But I’m also saying the effects of content caching will be less visible if the test was more realistic to how forums are really used.

Apachebench is not complete enough and not real-world enough.

The problem is it’s going to take a week or two of coding to write something better and I can’t imagine someone doing that unless they were serious and skilled enough to do it.

I could write a plugin that defeats apachebench entirely, it’s very easy. AB does not load any content on the page, no images, no scripts. So basically all I have to do is send it one hard coded script tag, nothing else on the page, and the script loads the page. Then bbPress would rank as fast as an empty static html/php page.

That’s an extreme unrealistic example but it’s part of what I am saying. A real world test would load the page like a browser does, it would accept and return cookies so a user couple be logged in, and it would post new content between reads.

Writing a test like that is hard work, so I am not surprised that just using AB is the fallback.

You want bbPress to be cached? It can already do that, deep integrate with WP and then use wp-super-cache (or similar).

But then the page generation time is hidden in the first page render, let’s say it takes 800ms or more. Each next page will only take 20ms or less to serve. But Apachebench is “dumb” and doesn’t know that, it can only show best/worst and averages.

What if SMF or one of the others take 2 seconds for the first render on a new login and then 20ms for each successive? That 2 seconds is important if the content/user is constantly changing. What if a forum generates a list of topics the same for everyone but then uses javascript to change the list after the fact by using extra queries outside of the original page render? Apachebench cannot “catch” any of those scenarios or show their performance.

[rafio]

Hey Everyone!

I am tracking opinions on bb-bench.com on internet from my curiosity (I am NOT associated with that initiative in any way).

I find this thread interesting in negative way. Hovewer responses on those results are not suprise to me. Every dev unsatissfied with results attacks test itself ignoring bad solutions (or lack of countersolutions) in his code.

You say “test is bad because we dont implement cache while others do”. That indeed has its effect on BBPress results hovewer as end-user I am interested in performace. Caching algorithms are necessary if you aim your software for bigger communities.

Ofcourse you can say “hey, if load is too big, you can always switch to more powerful hosting plan”. Thats true, however whats heaper for user? Change hosting solution or community software for faster one?

What I am especially disgusted with is how you claimed other solutions use full-page cache, while none of them does. Lying about other software to make your one appear “more fair” is really cheap shot.

If your code lacks features like caching, you implement those, dont argue over how cache is bad and gives others unfair advantage in tests. How hard it is to implement basic cache mechanism to code? Implementing it will make software better.

[chrishajer]

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/no-feedback-after-adding-tag-to-existing-topic-here

[johnhiler]

Ah I see… thanks for the tip!

[Rich Pedley]

they get added, but you need to refresh the page to see them. Known issue, sadly.

[johnhiler]

Try this plugin – it should do the trick!

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/mass-edit/

[johnhiler]

I was just trying to add a “modlook” tag to a few spammy posts, but wasn’t able to do so.

Are tags broken on bbpress.org?

[kaihsynliu]

Since file hosted by mediafire could be expired some day, I put the files on my own space. http://imlab.cs.nccu.edu.tw/~kaihsyn/files/bbPress_zh_tw.zip

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

@ckwalsh I am do supporting _ck_, bbPress as bbPress is generating each and everything again and again on each page load. It doesn’t matter if its a first load or second or third whereas in other forum scripts, there is some sort of caching involved in each of them which makes the difference in subsequent loads by caching atleast some part of it.

I hope I made my point. If I had nothing to say or I wouln’d have got a word about what’s being discussed here, I wouldn’t have left a comment.

[MakMak2]

The work around seems to be log out of WordPress then log in to bbPress when you want to administer bbPress.

Yeah I figured that, so wait, there’s no current way to circumvent that?

[_ck_]

All BBcode-lite users should upgrade to 1.0.5 IMMEDIATELY

(regardless if you allow images or not)

http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbcode-lite/

http://plugins-svn.bbpress.org/bbcode-lite/trunk/

This is an important security update.

[_ck_]

Okay here’s the reality.

Basically bbPress doesn’t run it’s tag filter on post_text when the text is finally displayed, because it would be too slow.

Instead it only checks tags during saving time and filters then.

If an item is not a tag AT SAVE TIME it won’t get checked.

That is how this is slipping through, because bbcode are not html tags.

I have a quick, dirty fix.

Basically anything that gets stuck INSIDE a tag ie. [HERE] = < HERE > is no longer allowed to contain spaces, single quote or double quote. Stuff [blah]HERE[/blah] = <blah>HERE</blah> is okay.

Preventing spaces alone, in theory, should be enough. Even url or entity encoding won’t get properly parsed. It will simply display as plain text and then you can see who is posting what instead of hidden stuff.

The only good news is that this problem in theory should not allow admin cookies to be stolen since the last version of 0.9 and 1.x already use HttpOnly cookies which cannot be read by javascript.

The downside of the quick-fix is that secondary attributes are no longer possible until I come up with another way. Example of secondary would be alt or title etc.

Many thanks for reporting this Tom!

[_ck_]

Double frack, it’s not just IMG.

Working hard on a fix.

All BBcode-lite users should upgrade to 1.0.5 IMMEDIATELY

(regardless if you allow images or not)

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbcode-lite/

https://plugins-svn.bbpress.org/bbcode-lite/trunk/

[_ck_]

Oh frack, it’s bbcode-lite.

I run through post-text so the bbpress parser never fires.

Fortunately img is disabled by default but I bet people turn it on.

Working on a fix.

[chrishajer]

If the software you install today works for you, why upgrade it to the plugin version? It’s not even an “upgrade” so much as it will be installing completely different software. It would be like switching from bbPress to WP Forum or some other forum plugin for WordPress. Would you expect your bbPress plugins to work with any other WordPress forum plugin? I don’t think so, and I don’t think you should expect any existing plugins for bbPress to work (or even be necessary, for that matter, when running the WordPress plugin.)

[tom.mccabe]

I’m using the Allow Images plugin (https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/allow-images/).

[enatom]

How did you do you this?

[Elias Schwerdtfeger]

By default, bbPress does not allow using the img tag, it needs a plugin for this functionality. Of course, the given attributes style and any kind of JavaScript handler is highly unwanted, but it is a weakness in the plugin’s code, which has to be patched asap.

[tom.mccabe]

Hey everyone. I believe there’s a security flaw within BBPress that allows for any forum user to insert JavaScript into their posts. For instance, the following code replaces instances of “oldStuff” with “newStuff”:

[img]http://www.whatever.net/forums/bb-admin/images/blank.gi” style=”display:none;” onerror=”this.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.innerHTML = this.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.innerHTML.replace(/oldStuff|onerror/g,’newStuff’);[/img]

What are the patching instructions? Thanks.

[_ck_]

All your current benchmark proves is that bbPress will be slower for 20 concurrent connections over 1000 passes, where no-one is logged in and the content never changes.

What I am saying is that’s not how people run forums, you need a more realistic benchmark, which I know from experience is going to be tricky to code.

bbPress 0.9 will be faster than what you have shown by about 50% and then with content caching it will compete fairly against the others.

Apachebench is not dynamic enough to prove real-world usefulness and barebones bbpress out-of-the-box is certainly not setup for a large site. But with plugins it certainly can be. There are some reasonably large sites on the Top 100.

[garyditsch]

thanks, that actually makes sense. my question now is that both of my blogs have the “wp_” prefix. i think that saying “new” is misleading.

both blogs are fairly established, so i’m not sure what would happen if i changed the wp_prefix? there are already 100’s of posts on that blog and while i’m trying to transfer the users from one blog to another, i’d rather not lose the posts/pages

so.. i guess what i’m looking at is that the user tables are named the same thing b/c i just used the normal wp set up, but they sit on different databases. i’m wondering if just naming the user_table will work?

[tpack]

I did this in my footer.php of my Kakumei theme.

Find your theme folder. E.g. /forums/bb-templates/YOUR-THEME/footer.php.

Edit footer.php code:

<div id=”footer” role=”contentinfo”>

<p><?php printf(__(‘%1$s is an online discussion site of the YOUR-DOMAIN.com‘), bb_option(‘name’), “http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com&#8221;) ?></p>

[ckwalsh]

Um, wow. I’ll admit I’m quite astounded and I’m not quite sure what to say, but I’ll try.

Actually the PHP version kinda proved my point about content caching.

It’s taking 3-4 ms.

The front page index on most of those forums is taking 20-25ms

Uh… no they aren’t. http://bb-bench.com/benchmark/1#section_p_index

That’s impossibly fast, it definitely means content is not being regenerated. If the cache was defeated it would have to re-render the whole thing and the page time would be significantly higher.

No, it’s not impossibly fast. I have not perused the code of most systems, but I can guarantee phpBB does not cache the output of its pages. They are retrieved every page load. Sure, there is a caching system in place, but it doesn’t catch the output of a page, only stores a few variables that don’t even improve performance particularly. As for caching at the apache level, you would see a much bigger difference in speed than you do see. Without special configuration, apache should never cache the output of a php page, since that would entirely defeat the purpose of a dynamically generated page.

Caching page output is near impossible for forums in general, due to forum permissions and session specific information. It would be kind of bad if my “One private message unread” were cached for you. The only other form of caching is the sql cache, which is contained entirely within MySQL, and is automatically activated for all queries, regardless of software.

bbPress doesn’t even save the tag cloud between pages, it will re-render it each and every time, which is at least 1/4th of the page render time (that can be changed via a plugin).

Sounds like that’s a big area for bbPress to improve. But it still doesn’t make the result invalid: bbPress is slower.

So 265ms vs 78ms

bbPress 0.9 is “only” 187ms slower than statically served PHP.

Do your math again. It’s 260ms slower than a static page. It’s still damn slow, and if someone installs bbpress and *pick another board* side by side, the bbpress one will not perform better. While technically correct, it does nothing to affect the overall results.

@ckwalsh, Your benchmarks are incorrect this way. _ck_ is right about it

Can you please paraphrase what his arguments are, and perhaps add a little bit more? I’m getting the feeling that you posted here to support _ck_ since the results I found were unfavorable to bbPress, and you don’t have anything to add, or even understand the discussion. Not to say I only want to talk to experts, but blind bandwagonning always frustrates me on the internet.

Basically I’d want to see a simulated load with logged in users being served different content – ie. unread posts for different users

Certainly apache bench isn’t perfect, however, it does show the relative performance of those 3 pages, which are almost guaranteed to be responsible for the majority of requests to a forum. I have been considering how to build a better tool, but have not gotten a chance to do so yet.

But plugins can still do content caching themselves. For example I realized awhile back that the Hot Tag cloud that bbPress renders is taking at least 1/4th of the total page render time, and it does it each and every time, regardless if there are new tags added or deleted. So my Hot Tags Plus plugin caches the tag cloud as static html (as well as add many other features to it at the same time).

If you think that will drop load time, it seems to be something anyone can add – I’d certainly be willing to install it for my tests.

Overall, you seem to be upset that bbPress performed so badly, leading you to say the benchmark is wrong. While it isn’t perfect, what it does show it shows rather precisely. In the current state of forum software, bbPress does appear to have a long way to go. It doesn’t matter if it was rewritten. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have caching (if so, that is a failure of bbPress, not an unfair advantage to other software). When comparing the same functionality between software, those are the results, like them or not.