[superaven]

Hi,

We’re contemplating moving our website to WordPress and are looking at integrated forum options to replace an older version of vBulletin we’re running now. I know vBulletin to WordPress bridges exist, but I’m hesitant as its been a nightmare bridging it to our current CMS and hoping to also not have to maintain two separate scripts, never mind theming them both as well.

Anyhow, I was informed that BBPress shares the same database table as WordPress and that migrating a forum as large as ours would have a massively negative effect on our WordPress install and properly affect our posts pretty bad.

Our vBulletin forum has approximately 180,000 members, 100,000 threads and roughly 6.5 million comments.

Any suggestions on how we might best proceed in a forum solution should we go the WordPress route for the rest of our website? I did see Simple:Press and saw it runs off a different table… Hate to be superficial, but looking at the website, it doesn’t really inspire confidence. (no offense)

Thank you in advance for any input or insight that can help us make a decision.

[superaven]

Forgot to mention… Our server hardware is pretty robust ands plenty capable for a stand alone forum like vBulletin or Xenforo. Since BBPress looks so streamlined and minimal, I’d have guessed its resource footprint on our servers would be significantly less than some of those other forum systems that has ever heel and whistle imaginable.

I know these discussions often turn towards solutions like throwing more system resources at a problem and you can run just about anything, but trying to get an idea of efficiency as best I can so we can make an informed decision.

[superaven]

Doh, just saw this thread despite our forum being quite a bit larger… https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbbpress-performance/

[Stephen Edgar]

Hi,

The issue discussed in the thread you linked to is being updated/fixed for the next bbPress release, version 2.6, we are currently just working through some other bits as part of 2.6 before finalizing this update.

I don’t see the size of your vBulletin forum being an issue for bbPress 2.6, the ‘last active time’ is a bit of a pain for large sites though there are also a couple of workarounds already implemented in these large sites.

What version of vBulletin are you currently using?

bbPress has built in importers for vBulltin 3.x and 4.x, I also have a ‘development’ version for vBulletin 5.x that will be in a future release of bbPress.

[superaven]

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for your reply.

So to be clear, you feel that if I were to implement a work around for ‘last active time’ or wait to install BBPress version 2.6 that I can confidently run BBPress on a forum that size?

Is ‘last active time’ really the bottle neck? As I understood this issue, it had to do with BBPress sharing the DB table with the WordPress posts.

Lastly, do you have a target date for v2.6?

Thanks again,

Allen

[Stephen Edgar]

So to be clear, you feel that if I were to implement a work around for ‘last active time’ or wait to install BBPress version 2.6 that I can confidently run BBPress on a forum that size?

Indeed, as you stated you need a fairly robust server though it sounds like you already have that. As bbPress 2.6 continues development I’d suggest you set yourself up a test install on your local PC and do some benchmarks and test the vBulletin importer as ~6.5 million posts will take a bit of time to import and familiarising yourself with how this works is worth knowing so you know what has to be done before you switch over your live site.

Is ‘last active time’ really the bottle neck? As I understood this issue, it had to do with bbPress sharing the DB table with the WordPress posts.

Yes, ‘last active time’ is the primary bottleneck as by default we sort topics based on the latest reply in a topic, though if a topic has no replies this is slotted in also.

The full technical details of this are here https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1925, it is not the easiest read and as there are two potential methods discussed. Primarily because of this ticket is why bbPress 2.6 is running late as there is a boat load of testing to be done to make sure we don’t break backwards compatibility.

Lastly, do you have a target date for v2.6?

3 weeks late 😉

[superaven]

Thanks again Stephan.

Not so worried about the import… I’ve sourced an outfit that specializes in complex data migrations and will probably leave it to them to develop a custom tailored solution for it.

It is great to hear the rest of it though. I’ll bring this up to everybody so we can dig a bit deeper and put BBPress back on the possible contender short list. Hopefully you guys push it out soon, but truth is we’re kinda behind schedule ourselves.

Looking forward to seeing how BBPress evolves.

[Stephen Edgar]

Cool, have a look around the site here also as there a few interesting topics, like this one.

Let us know if you need anything else, will try to answer any Q’s you have.

p.s. Our vBulletin importer is pretty awesome, works well, and is included free, the downside is waiting for those MySQL queries to finish 😉

[willywonkabar]

Hey superaven,

Did you ever complete your move to BBPress? I’m looking to do the same from a 4.2.2 install, 300k+ members, 60K threads, 600K+ posts, and was hoping for some feedback on successful medium/big board moves.

If so, care to share how the migration went, any hiccups in the migration, specific thoughts about overall performance you’re experiencing, and any limitations in features or lack of features as compared to VB?

As I see also mentioned in this thread, 2.6 is still not out (88% complete), with 2.5.8 the most recent release.

Thanks!

[superaven]

Hey willywonkabar,

Unfortunately, I never tried. As mentioned further up, the fix needed for us to do so was supposed to be rolled into v2.6 which was due out soon. You’ll note on the download page that after all this time, the latest stable release is still at 2.5.8, so unfortunately BBPress isn’t even an option for us yet. Really sucks, because we’ve lost massive amounts of traffic struggling with bridge options and so far none have been all that great. We moved from vBulletin and settled on Xenforo as at least there appeared to be plugins to bridge their forum system to WordPress, but we’ve found after paying and testing the top 3 or so, that all come with compromises of one sort or another. We’re actually in the process of a major development effort now to move from a fully custom theme to a commercial theme for the purposes of simplifying the complexity of everything and dropping the various plugins and custom development we’d been using for our authentication and member roles. Hoping this improves the situation with the bridge, but not holding my breath. I really wish I could move us to an integrated solution like BBPress so we no longer have to worry about hacked bridges and unreliable authentication, but until BBPress improves the methods of how data is stored, it isn’t an option for large / active forums.

Sorry I don’t have better news for you.

[Pascal Casier]

@superaven @willywonkabar
v2.6 is in a pretty advanced state now. You can download the current alpha version from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bbpress.zip . It has improved a lot in, amongst other things, importing from other forums.

It would be of great help if both of you could test it and let us know your feeling about it.

Pascal.

[Dotstore]

@casiepa,

I am thinking of migrate my XenForo forums to bbpress forums.

My problem is that my fourms data are very huge approx 169000 users and approx 6269000 rows of xf_post table so my XenForo’s database’s table sizes are in giga bites.

-> So my question is does bbpress default importer tools is able to import these huge data on single click.?
-> Is there any extension or plugin required to import my users and forums from XenForo ?

Please let me know your thoughts so that I can move forward to it.

Thanks,
Multidots

[Pascal Casier]

Hi,
As written above, I would propose to test with bbPress v2.6-alpha and see how it goes with the import. There should be no issues about the size of topics/replies you have. The import start on the first one and … just goes to the last one !
Pascal.

[Dotstore]

@casiepa,

Thanks for the feedback.

I was able to import approx 1500 user successfully but one issue I am facing is I can not login to my bbpress site with my xenforo user password?

-> Does bbpress is auto generating password and sending to user email ?
-> If not bbpress is sending new password to user then how user will be able to login into my bbpress site ?

Thanks,
Multidots

[willywonkabar]

Hey superaven,

That’s a perfect answer, actually. I was hoping that the move was successful, but even with what you shared, there’s still value in your answer. So thanks for that.

We’re currently testing BBPress and plan to test Xenforo and Discourse as well. Xenforo has its origins in VB, so to us, that seemed like the most like-for-like switch, but as we’re also a WP shop, with 10 years worth of posts, we were hoping to bring everything to WP, or find something with cleaner integration with WP. bbPress is/was our hope for that. As we currently stand, with our hybrid WP/VB site, user authentication, access control, and user profile data defaults to VB, using an open-source VB plugin. We want to bring that into WP, so we can take advantage of some other WP-specific plugins/services, keeping that user profile data (and profile pages) in WP instead, without needing custom code. Having all of that under one roof has its obvious advantages.

We’ll continue to test bbPress and the other platforms on our end. Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated.

[pyronaught]

I just ported a Dot Net Nuke site to Word Press and migrated the Active Forums forum to bbPress. This is a forum that only has 4000 uers, 20K topics and 200K replies. Even running locally with no other users it is very sluggish running on bbPress. Other related plugins I’m running that might effect speed are WP eMembers, bbPress Multi Image Uploader and bbPress Pencil Unread. I still need to add a plugin for signatures and probably another one for statistics. But the bottom line is I should be getting snappy response times when clicking on forums and topics on a locally staged site with a forum of this size and no other concurrent users, but I’m not.

A lot of reviews assume bbPress should be fast due to being “lightweight,” but I think database design has more to do with speed. The big problem I see with bbPress is that they are piling ALL data into a single wp_posts table, where a lot of other word press plugins also seem to like to pile their data into. While most forum software have separate tables for forums, topics, replies and attachments in order to minimize the amount of data that has to be sifted through on each query, bbPress just puts them all in one giant table and then uses post_type to sort them out. There are also no stored procedures or views being used to help optimize performance. So it is really no surprise that it is as slow as it is. Why on earth the designers chose to just glom onto an existing WP table intended for blog posts instead of using separate purpose-built tables is beyond me, but I would be very leery of running any large forums on this thing. I would also be very surprised if version 2.6 makes it any faster.

[pyronaught]

I removed all widgets from the side bar just in case they were effecting page load times, but they had minimal effect. I’m getting average page load times of 3 seconds consistently no matter what part of the forum I’m viewing. Put the site on a server somewhere and get a bunch of users hitting it at the same time and that number is only going to get worse.

I’m also running the free version of W3 Total Cache and do not notice any difference than running without it. I don’t think it caches the forum pages though, probably for good reason.

[tharsheblows]

@pyronaught, if it’s a local install, could you look at the queries to see which ones are super slow? I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/ for things like that.

(I mean look at them and post them here so we can figure out where exactly the problem is! No worries if that’s not possible or you just don’t feel like it. 🙂 )

[pyronaught]

Wow, that’s a pretty cool tool you linked to, thanks! I was trying to do a similar thing with MySQL Workbench, but that plugin is way better.

The report is pretty huge, so here’s just the top part with the two slowest queries. These two forum queries really only account for .35 seconds combined, but there are a little over 200 other queries that pile on to bring the total query time to 1.02 secs, which still doesn’t seem bad really. So I guess something other than queries is adding another 2 seconds. I was surprised to see 200 queries though, I had no idea that much was going on with the database. I had one page with nothing on it but a site map and it showed like 8000 queries! WTF? Talk about death by a thousand cuts. Anyway, here’s the info:

Performance
3.15S 28.61MB 1.0261S 193Q

3.1452
1.3% of 240s limit 29,292 kB
2.8% of 1,048,576 kB limit 1.0261 SELECT: 187
UPDATE: 4
SHOW: 2

Slow Database Queries (above 0.05s)

Query

Caller

Time

SELECT wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts
WHERE 1=1
AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘reply’
AND ((wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’
OR wp_posts.post_status = ‘closed’))
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 5
WP_Query->get_posts+

0.2070

SELECT post_status, COUNT( * ) AS num_posts
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_type = ‘reply’
GROUP BY post_status
wp_count_posts+

0.1460

[tharsheblows]

🙂 I love that tool too! If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ you might get some ideas about what’s slowing it down. It’s the latency that’s taking so long?

Wow for the 8000 query sitemap!

I have a couple of pages which load slower than I’d like but have an excellent host so when the site gets hammered it doesn’t slow it down further. They also provide caching so I can’t give you any advice on W3 Total Cache except that you might try tweaking your settings.

[pyronaught]

That’s an interesting tool too, although it didn’t give me much advice that I am able to do anything about other than turning off plugins that were not being used. I did upload a copy of the forum to a test site so see if there was any difference compared to running it locally. It’s about the same really. I don’t know how this forum here is so fast, if I could get mine to be this fast I’d be happy. The whole site just seems sluggish, even the pages without the forum on it.

http://www.sky-disc.com/forums/

Most of that forum is private, but I opened up the Stuff For Sale section for testing without an account.

[pyronaught]

Here’s another performance profiler that is useful: https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/

Not as detailed as the Query Monitor, but it does give you a view of which plugins are hogging the most time. bbPress is at the top of the time-hog list on my application, which is not surprising given that it has to deal with the most data.

[pyronaught]

I should mention I’m developing on Webmatrix, so IIS is the server. The hosted link above is also running on IIS. Would Apache run the site faster?

[pyronaught]

So I put two versions of my forum up on two different live sites: one hosted by IIS server running on Windows and one hosted by Apache running on Linux. Apache beat IIS hands down, it wasn’t even close on page load times. So it’s bye-bye Microsoft for me, LAMP is the way to go for speedy page loads.

So just don’t run bbPress on an IIS site and the speed is acceptable.

[Dotstore]

@netweb I have tried my huge Xenforo data to convert data using BBPress import tool, my script is running since last 2 days, and I have imported below data using BBPress import tool.

Users: 94,600 out of 1,59,679
Forums: 0 out of 41
Topic: 83867 out of 83,813
Replies: 31,279 out of 62,65,110

Now, I am facing below issue to import the data using BBPress tools.

1) Sometimes scripts are automatically stopped and script not start automatically.

2) Currently, lots of data is still pending to import in BBPress but the script is not running and in tools bottom section I can see only “Starting Conversion” and loader.

3) I have noticed in the tool having the duplication issue you can see above in Xenforo only 83,813 topics but BBPress tool imported 83,867 records. So 54 records are duplicates. so this issue resolved using BBPress repair forum tabs?

4) BBPress import tool taking random data from the Xenforo database. I have noticed when I have started the script first the users come from the Xenforo. But unfortunately, the users are skipped and the tool has started to import the topic. So, I am a bit confused here BBpress import tool can complete import all the users, topic, forums, and replies successfully? you can see above my total Xenforo user is 1,59,679 and BBPress tool has imported only 94,600. and the now script has started to import replies.

Can you please suggest here what is the best solutions to import all the data properly?

[superaven]

Wondering if there’s been any progress with this? Sort of bummed that version 2.6 isn’t out even though it’s mentioned as a solution in this thread I started 2+ years ago.

Been struggling with WordPress x Xenforo integration and have literally bought every commercial bridge addon / plugin and have spent thousands of dollars hiring sys admins and developers to try and make it work. Best case scenario is it works until the next update and then it’s borked again. Most are one way bridges so they force logins / registrations through Xenforo, which also sucks.

Honestly BBPress is the last hope as far as the exhaustive reserach I’ve done on the subject, but it’s dead on arrival for anyone running a high traffic forum. Almost tempted to drop WordPress, but nothing else with forum integration comes close.

Anyone have any type of news beyond try the alpha version and report issues?

Thanks.