[zaerl]

sorry….I don’t know this is a support forum.

looks like a demo site…

Well the title of this page is “okiss test topic << bbPress Support Forums.”

[Andre]

Can someone please give an update on whether or not bbpress as a plugin will be available for testing this week and let us know where we need to go for updates? I check http://bbpdevel.wordpress.com/ and http://bbdevel.wordpress.com/, but neither has been updated in a while.

[Ricardo]

From a user prespective

@kevinjohngallagher and _CK_

i agree with you two, specially the parts where you say bbpress.org users and mods are updated on bbpress stuff through other sites, relying on wordpress dashboard to spread the news sounds like a last minute attempt to minimize damages, but hey…nobody is perfect)

A lot of bbpress sucess is due to pluggin developers and i think its “out of order” to post bbpress news on buddypress blog, there are moderators here that are pluggin developers that feel “betrayed and hopless” because they spend countless hours and days and nobody tells them nothing… how would you feel JJJ if it was you? i’m aware nobody is perfect but you did talk about bbpress there and even linked to bbpress.org so why not say something here first? “i feel” your pain mods…

about the name change… i aalso agree it should be called bbpress 2.0 but i think that alone wont stop all the confusion around different versions… i agree with you (_CK_) but newcomers will still be confused wether its 2.0 or 1.2 because the real confusion its not the name but the several different versions.

All in all i think the next version is what a lot of users wanted (pluggin integration, no more backpress etc), thing is a lot of the sucess is due to pluggin authors that spent countless hours making sure their pluggins/themes work across several versions, now they have (or not) to start over.

2 last questions:

can we install the next version on its own? where can we download the alpha/beta of it? where is it? i would like to test even if its not fully functional like we do for wordpress, i can only find reference to the pluggin version at: http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress/branches/plugin/

not enough communication around… Good luck and thanks to everyone that works on bbpress wether coding/theming/pluggins or here maintaining the forum.

[okissliu]

yes..

I will survey more in google.

thanks for your reply.

maybe you can delete this strange test…

sorry for bothering..

[Rich Pedley]

bbPress 1.2 (the plugin) should be stable enough to start testing as soon as September 15 (give or take a few days and/or missing features) with a full release due around the same time as BuddyPress 1.3.

ref: https://buddypress.org/2010/08/buddypress-and-bbpress-the-future/

that is why people are asking.

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

lol

testing live on support forums, thats new

[webprof]

Ok, so I have managed (??) to install the latest version.

But the problem now is that admin area doe not look correct. If I understand correctly it should look similar to wordpress and it does not.

Also, if I wanted to make changes to a theme, is there any way to make the changes inside the admin area or do I have make changes to the actual file and then ftp?

[_ck_]

I totally agree that _ck_’s involvement is crucial.

Y’all don’t need me. I highly encourage you to keep going with the fork and there doesn’t have to be just one fork.

Remember, WordPress itself is just one (big) fork (of b2evolution).

I’ll be taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year starting next month or so as I have serious real-life things to deal with, and then *maybe* announcing my own project next year in the spring. Instead of a fork it will be a 50% or more rewrite of the entire core, fixing a few legacy problems. But it would not be available to the public for at least a year from now at the soonest and it won’t be fully backwards compatible.

It literally took me three years but I kinda figured out an indirect way of doing something like this. Part of the solution is so simple that I guarantee WordPress will “steal” the idea within six months of me publishing the code because it’s backwards compatible and a great idea that no-one else apparently has thought of yet for some mysterious reason. I’ve already tested a proof-of-concept and it’s one of those things that once you see it, everyone says “well that’s so simple anyone could have thought of it”. But no one has, yet.

[MathiasB]

<ul class="topicmeta">

[KentonMr]

‘trunk’ ?

I’m still a newbie – I though the download was the latest release “approved”

I didn’t even know of that bug list

… so good is the documentation … and I’ll bet that most users don’t or can be bothered to dig around in the maze of code to figure out why it doesn’t perform how expected.

This sort of bug fix is easy to apply – affecting only a couple of lines of code there ought to be a forum/list somewhere to enable these sort of changes to be publicised – perhaps there is but I just haven’t connected with it yet.

Still at least I managed to fix this problem one on my own … I get the feeling watching others struggle that this is what comes with bbPress … being on your own

[KittysForum]

lol @ vanilla forums. I’ve been testing them for two weeks and would not recommend them to anyone.

[Jeremy]

I’m trying to show the latest topics across the entire board in a sidebar. I foolishly tried creating a standard loop (if ($topics) : foreach ($topics as $topic) : ?>), but of course if you’re on a forum you only see topics within that forum, not across the entire board. I can’t puzzle out how to make the right query. Should I use bb_query? $bbdb_get_results()? Something else?

Thanks.

[rafio]

>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.

I can agree with that, but only in part. Person with right knowledge will read bench results correctly. Others? Not neccessary. From my own experience I know that casual bread eaters (lets call them CBE for short and comic relief) take different approach for this. Before forum generates serious traffic on user’s host, it goes like this:

* It works for me.

* Its slower, but I like it.

* Who Cares?

* Its not so bad

I am not making this up, those are real testimonies i received when working on web apps.

[_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.

[rafio]

Can you quote me where on bb-bench it claims those tests aim to reproduce production enviroment?

Thats only comparision between systems. Everywhere I see people taking this as real-live scenario, but it doesnt. Its just to show people differences between softwares with same forum size (topics, posts and forums).

[_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.

[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.

[_ck_]

quick ‘n’ dirty test: ab -c 20 -n 1000

bbpress 1.1

.             min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Total:         46  458 117.9    453    1250

bbpress 0.9 (with $bb->load_options=true;)

.             min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Total:         46  275  90.6    265     890

453ms vs 265ms (or 458 vs 275)

So, I’d expect I’d see around a 50% improvement on your box on 0.9

now – vs static cache content simulation:

bbPress 0.9 front page html saved as static.php

and <?php $test=1; ?> put at top to force PHP parser to turn on

.             min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Total:         15   75  14.3     78     109

So 265ms vs 78ms

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

In a nutshell:

.             min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

bbpress 1.0:   46  458 117.9    453    1250

bbpress 0.9:   46  275  90.6    265     890

static PHP     15   75  14.3     78     109

[_ck_]

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

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.

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).

So you aren’t testing renderer-vs-renderer, you’re testing content caching vs content caching. You aren’t even testing for logged-in users but only outside visitors.

If we are going to play that game, all someone has to do is port wp-super-cache to bbpress and it will beat every forum in existence, because static html will be served via htaccess directly and bypass PHP/MySQL entirely. So you’d be down to 4ms (or less) per page.

In any case, I am looking forward to seeing how 0.9 does against 1.0 under 20 concurrency.

[ckwalsh]

I just ran some tests, with an html file and a php file, both containing “Hello World”. You can find the apache bench results here: http://pastebin.ca/1934137

Clearly they are much faster than any forum software, handling 5000+ and 9000+ requests per second each (I had to run apache bench with 100,000 hits to get a semi accurate reading)

As for a write once, read many times situation, blogs do exhibit such behavior more so than forums, I’ll admit. However, forums are certainly more read heavy than write heavy.

Take a look at phpBB.com’s support forum, http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=46 . You will be hard pressed to find a topic without at least 5 times as many views as posts, and many of the sticky topics have over 100 times as many reads as posts. Show me any forum with more writes than reads and I will be impressed.

I’ll be running bbpress 0.9 later tonight, along with some changes to SMF that they suggested.

[_ck_]

When you test a static file, I’d like to see it done like this.

1. run it as php so it has to go through the php parser

2. call it with a unique query on the url for each page per thread

the purpose of the above is to (slightly) defeat pure caching on apache’s part

I will always disagree that forums are write-once/read-many-times

That behavior is found with blogs, not forums.

The popular forums I belong to have new posts every few seconds which is very different than even the most popular blogs I read.

[_ck_]

I look forward to a static page for comparison on your graph.

It will prove what I am saying about content caching.

I have a test SMF install handy and I can see it uses less than a half-dozen queries on a 2nd page load which is a dead giveaway there is caching – I am sure every other 3rd gen forum package has it too. You have APC running and I know that SMF also takes advantage of that, so probably do others.

bbPress never got content caching because Matt keeps having the core re-invented every couple years (backpress and now as WP plugin) so we keep getting back to square one for advanced features. Don’t be confused by versions 0.9 is a different program than 1.0 and 1.2 is a completely different program than 1.0 or 0.9 (that’s Matt’s fault).

So I still insist this isn’t a fair comparison.

But bbPress 0.9 should be about halfway between the 1.x and other forum software (ie. 50% faster) 0.9 will be continued to developed independently, so it’s worth benchmarking.

If you are willing to put a couple of tweaks in the bb-config with 0.9 I think we can get a little closer to the rest of the pack at the bottom, ie.

$bb->load_options = true;

off the top of my head (note that does nothing in 1.0)

[_ck_]

Didn’t it dawn on you when you see all the boards performing exactly the same under load with static content that they are using a page cache?

I mean that leaps out at me when I look at this:

http://bb-bench.com/benchmark/1/graphs/p/forum-middle.png

That’s obviously dynamic vs static content.

Put a static HTML page on your server and run the same tests against it to show the baseline.

[minervaa]

*Happy?*

Yap ! this time it’s working perfectly! Thanks a ton to both of you.

That means using this plugin, no html is supported at all on the topics?

Is it possible to improve this plugin a little bit as –

1. It will allow admin to post any clickable links(including outgoing) on the the topics

2. It will allow anyone to post clickable links ONLY when the link is from the same domain as the forum? (internal links)

To give an example, lets say this plugin is activated in bbpress.org.

A member post a topic saying

“Buy cheap Viagra from http://www.cheapest-vira-xyz.info&#8221; <– this link would be plain text.

“A member post a topic saying “Has any one got this working? https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/cant-switch-themes-in-081&#8221; <– this link would be clickable

again if any member post a topic saying “have you read this bbPress blog here ? https://www.bbpress.org/blog/latest/bla-bla-bla-bla&#8221; <– this link would be clickable as they are from the same domain as the forum

If the above functions can be implemented on this plugin, that would be a brilliant tool to put off most of the spammers.