A bunch of options are now pulled from the database.
You will see a significant reduction in queries if you add this line to your bb-config.php file…
$bb->load_options = true;
I’m sort of amazed that no one else has mentioned this as a potential problem. I have on average 50,000 pageviews / day.
So 50,000 pageviews / day * 35 queries / page gives 1,750,000 queries per day.
I’m at one million queries as it is today with one of my sites running bbpress, I don’t think an upgrade is an option with the above since memory consumption has started to become an issue with that installation.
The bb->load_options = true brought the load of the cpu to 5 times that of the one with 30+ queries but I guess that comes from not having that many topics in the newly installed Db so I really don’t know what to make of this.
I’m of course realizing that bbpress rocks. Totally. I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I didn’t think it was worth while pursuing so don’t take the above the wrong way but do please give me a hint as to whether or not you advice me to go with this release or to stick with the 0.72 which I’ve found to be very stable.
Any known issues with 0.9.0.1 so far? Anyone who has any reports on memory consumption? Very much appreciated.
@sam: you do marvelous work. Thanks again.
_ck_ might be able to give you some version performance comparisons.
0.72 is a very old version.
0.72 is old yes. stable yes. quite fast yes.
0.9.0.1 is new and shiny but we don’t know anything about the performance. It seems fast but I wonder if anyone who runs it *live* have some real data to show for it? That would be great.
@_ck_: if you have some performance data please share. Thanks!
We have been running revisions which are only slightly older than 0.9.0.1 at WordPress.org and WordPress.com for a while now without fault.
Oh, and not to mention this forum as well.
ok ok, I believe you. 0.9.0.1 is good enough to give a try.
Just one more thing: I’m guessing you have something like 100,000 pageviews a day in this forums which would render about 3,000,000 queries (moderate estimate) if you run bbpress 0901 out of the box. Your servers are cool with this? RAM at OK level?
No need for exact figures but just a notion of what’s been your experience so far would be golden. 3,000,000 queries a day means around 35 queries per second. That’s some load.
Thanks again.
EDIT: The reason why I’m asking is that I’d really like to continue to use bbpress as my primary PHP-framework for all my sites that has logon/user needs as I’ve had a hard time to find a more suitable framework to my needs.
The bb->load_options = true brought the load of the cpu to 5 times that of the one with 30+ queries but I guess that comes from not having that many topics in the newly installed Db so I really don’t know what to make of this.
Turn on (or increase) your mysql caching. It’s fairly obvious you are running either without any or not enough of it if you can detect any load increase with load_options=true. The query to load all options would be exactly the same across all instances for all users and mysql would pick up on that immediately and keep it in the cache, always. At least that’s what happens on my installs. I don’t have a site with 50k views a day but I have a 0.8.2.1 version with 15k views a day and it runs very fast.
Also make sure you use a php opcode cache like eaccelerator, xcache, etc. Best thing you can do for bbPress or WordPress.
0.9 of bbPress is not some kind of radically different change since 0.8 – there are many bug fixes and a few features added but the db calls are almost identical (some plugins however can be sloppy about not caching queries so that can cause issues).
Try my bb-benchmark if you want to see what happening behind the scenes for each page generated.
I can only give you a vague idea of loads we experience in our environments. They aren’t exactly standard setups.
On WordPress.com the forums are served by the same infrastructure as the blogs. The forums don’t really make a dent in the load on that setup (hundreds of servers). Average of all queries is about 45 queries per second, over 90% of this is handled by MySQL query cache.
WordPress.org and bbPress.org are run from the same cluster which has three active load-balanced web servers and two database servers (one for writing and one for reading). The majority of the database load on this cluster is reads initiated by the forums and to a lesser extent reads initiated by the WordPress Codex (MediaWiki). Average load is about 700 reads per second, about 80% of those reads are cache hits.
Most of our servers have 2GB of RAM and 4 processor cores. Some DB servers might have more RAM. But there is nothing particularly special about the hardware otherwise. Pretty much the same as you would rent from a dedicated server provider.
As fascinating as it is, unfortunately the setup that automattic uses can’t be compared in any way to a single stand alone server (or VPS) running it’s own mysql processes since you can use a radical amount of caching ram on the dedicated db servers.
However bbPress could benefit someday from a port of wp-super-cache (or even just wp-cache2) to send non-logged in/non-members cached pages. There’s a big difference between a forum with 1000 active logged-in users where pages have to be customised via the core and plugins vs. 1000 guests/bots who all see the same pages.
It bothers me that my fully loaded demo at bbshowcase.org has now beached the 100ms mark for front-page generation (bare bbPress is like 40ms) but I can’t think of any easy ways to speed that up further without removing features. Maybe when PHP 5.3 comes out which seems to promise a 10-15% code speedup.
Using one server will only ever get you so far no matter how lean the application you are running is.
Massive query caches are no use if you don’t have the data to fill them. WordPress.com forums (all languages) doesn’t amount to more than 200Mb of data. So even a 1Gb query cache would be mostly empty or stale. WordPress.org wouldn’t be much bigger (and may be smaller). I don’t actually know what the query cache size is on the servers by the way. Query caching is great. Massive query caches aren’t anything special IMHO.
WordPress.org forum is about 500Mb of data.
