[ckwalsh]

I’ve built a site to collect software benchmarks of various bulletin board software, found at http://bb-bench.com/ . I’m trying to setup boards under the exact same conditions – forums, topics, posts, users, to show how they scale under various forum loads, to provide users fair, quantifiable claims regarding performance. All of the boards are setup with their stock configuration options (with the exception of phpBB with HipHop for PHP, which I’ll admit to having an unfair advantage)

I would love your comments. What other combinations of forums/topics/posts/etc you would be interested in seeing? Any additional pages?

Additionally, since there are obviously optimisations that can be performed on any forum software, perhaps you can suggest some that might improve the results of bbPress.

[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_]

Unless performance is crippling slow, those users’ arguments are very valid.

bbPress’s ability to be customized and slipped into foreign environments is extremely attractive. It’s incredibly easy to customize without breaking the core like most other forums.

But look at WordPress – it’s popularity defies ALL logic. Without heavy duty caching it would collapse most large sites. Apachebench would DESTROY it without page caching (using 17 categories with 7500 users and 10k posts with 10k comments). Of course it’s the sheer number of available customizations that override the care about lack of performance.