I recently looked at bbpress.org for the first time in a while and was excited to see the progress on the plugin.

I run a bbPress install that has thousands of signed in members and receives about 500k pageviews per month (1,000+ new topics, 18,000+ posts). It ain’t no Facebook, but with WP deep integration it requires a beefy dedicated server to keep it running smoothly.

I was wondering whether bbPress 2.0 was designed with something like this (or larger) in mind, or whether it is more for small forum use only.

The reason I ask is because I notice that (1) all topics/replies will go into the same db table and (2) some things that were denormalised in bb_posts/bb_topics for performance are no longer denormalised in the plugin. For the latter I’m thinking of the number of replies per topic, the last poster in a topic, etc.

It seems that the queries to build paginated topic lists might involve some quite complex joins over very large tables as a result. Is this the case, or am I missing some aspect of the design?

I know that the WP engine handles all of this for blogs, but blogs (even on wordpress.com, where each individual blog has its own post table) do not typically scale to 1000s of posts per day.

Bottom line, will bbPress 2.0 be advisable for larger installs? Or is that still a job for the standalone version?

Thanks.

[@rebootnow Participant 13 years, 5 months ago]

It has been a month and I think that this is a worthwhile thing to discuss, so giving it a bump.

[@master5o1 Participant 13 years, 5 months ago]

I agree, this is a valid question.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 13 years, 5 months ago]

It’s a concern for sure, and bbPress will scale no differently than WordPress does with that many entries.

Comparatively, bbPress 1.0’s schema was purpose built for exactly what it was designed to do, and using the WordPress posts table is a bit of square peg in a round hole. bbPress 2.0 is the compromise of maximum efficiency for ease of integration. If you must have maximum efficiency and are not using deep integration already, then bbPress 1.0 is the safest bet for now. bbPress 2.0 is only going to get better as more devs use it and more people interact with the code.

Ideally I’ll get it running on a few of our sites in the .org sphere and we’ll be able to stress test it a bit more. That will be happening in the next few weeks, but isn’t as much of a priority as releasing the first 2.0 version and getting BuddyPress 1.3 out as well.

[@rebootnow Participant 13 years, 5 months ago]

Thanks JJJ. This clarifies things and I understand the priorities.

And I’d be very interested to see bbPress 2.0’s perf on one of the big .org forums.

BTW, I think this issue is orthogonal to deep integration. It is really about…

1. The size of the posts table relative to a typical WordPress blog posts table

2. The fact that there is no denormalization to eliminate huge complex queries

This isn’t an issue for a Worpress blog, even a massive multisite installation like WordPress.com, because the posts table for each blog is separate and there is seldom a need to do a cross-blog query. This means that WordPress for blogs can scale nicely without too many tricks.

One potential solution is to create a helper table that denormalizes the things you need and points to the actual post in the wp_post table.

[@ryanhellyer Participant 4 years, 7 months ago]

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?

[@navrajvirsingh Participant 4 years, 6 months ago]

I am confused about selecting a forum for my website. I recently came across this java based forum, which looks very pretty to me, I think it is built on some other framework like java or PHP than on bbpress.

How can I find which forum framework it is? And where can I find a good developer to install it?

[@robin-w Moderator 4 years, 6 months ago]

not sure why you are asking on a bbpress forum – a bit like asking the Ford Garage about the best place to buy chrysler cars !

[@gdragon Participant 4 years, 6 months ago]

If you need a forum to look a certain way, that can be done with WordPress and bbPress. bbPress look and feel can be fully customized.