Judging by two recent comments [1, 2]made by two knowledgeable developers, it seems speed won’t be one of the key features the bbPress plugin will have going for it, at least not on initial launch.

How fast will BuddyPress forums run when powered by bbPp, as compared to the current BP+bbP integration?

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If that’s too general I can use my own website as an example:

Per month we have about:

50’000 visits

250’000 page views

5 pages/visit

The bulk of that activity goes on in our forum, i.e. groups.

We use W3 Total cache.

The site runs on a dedicated box. I don’t have the specs right now but it’s a fairly powerful Ubuntu computer.

We use a minimal amount of odd plugins & widgets, yet our forum runs pretty slow.

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Maybe this is a difficult question to answer, but I reckon it should at least be possible to make some fair assessments, and I do believe there’s a common interest in this information, considering the amount of people assessing the future of their community alongside the development of bbPp.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 13 years, 11 months ago]

Forum performance inside of BuddyPress is improved in 1.2.7 and will be further improved in 1.3 (which still includes the bbPress stand-alone version.)

Having BuddyPress load all of its code and process everything that it does is the bottleneck in your circumstance. You’d be better off loading bbPress standalone properly themed, then the bbPress plugin, and lastly inside of BuddyPress groups (regardless of standalone/plugin.)

But, I think it’s a horse a piece.

The more you need to load is the slower it’s going to be, and the more important caching becomes. The bbPress plugin will respond to W3TC much better than bbPress standalone and BuddyPress will, since it uses the existing WordPress object cache.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 13 years, 11 months ago]

Forum performance inside of BuddyPress is improved in 1.2.7 and will be further improved in 1.3 (which still includes the bbPress stand-alone version.)

Having BuddyPress load all of its code and process everything that it does is the bottleneck in your circumstance. You’d be better off loading bbPress standalone properly themed, then the bbPress plugin, and lastly inside of BuddyPress groups (regardless of standalone/plugin.)

But, I think it’s a horse a piece.

The more you need to load is the slower it’s going to be, and the more important caching becomes. The bbPress plugin will respond to W3TC much better than bbPress standalone and BuddyPress will, since it uses the existing WordPress object cache.

[@sadr Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

I’d love to use a standalone bbPress, but that option was long since abandoned I stand by the reasoning behind the plugin route though, I still think it’ll make our lives a whole lot easier.

Thanks for the pointers John. It’s also comforting to know that BuddyPress forums will be seeing some speed improvements in 1.3.

[@sadr Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

I’d love to use a standalone bbPress, but that option was long since abandoned I stand by the reasoning behind the plugin route though, I still think it’ll make our lives a whole lot easier.

Thanks for the pointers John. It’s also comforting to know that BuddyPress forums will be seeing some speed improvements in 1.3.