Feel free to play with page load times:
http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/forums/
vs.
http://bbpress.dreamhosters.com/smf/
The server is absolutely crawling right now so it’s a great time to see how bad each one is. With “fastload” bbpress is respectable against smf.
I’ve unblocked the hidden bb-benchmarks so any user can see them if you do a view source and scroll to the bottom if you want to see all the stats.
I’ve never seen their mysql take longer than 16-20ms to connect and never, ever more than 100ms to load all the queries. Storing code in mysql is crazy but just may work in weird cases like that. Of course if 1000 people did it, they’d ban the technique.
What’s really interesting is their microtime never gives accurate results and frequently negative numbers. Either their multi-cores have clocks that are out of sync or parts of the code are somehow executing on different servers???? I posted a question about it on their support forum and it was mysteriously deleted the next day.
They are both slower than all hell for me.
I’m very interested in your fastload plugin… but I wonder if it would matter much for opcode cached sites.
Seems like the majority of the problems in speed I’m getting are from the repeated hooks in tight loops.
No “fastload” is not very useful for servers with a proper opcode cache and responsive disk system (and files are fetched and rendered on the same node). On my VPS it actually adds a few ms on average.
The load on dreamhost has been over 20 for most of today so it’s not surprising anyone will find the bbpress+smf test sites slow.
I’m probably going to switch the showcase back to nearlyfreespeech shortly which is still on the slower side and uses only http 1.0 as it’s forces though a squid proxy.
Unless someone can find a $20 or less per year host that has a better setup as my budget is maxed out. Can’t even afford to replace my mouse that’s acting up right now.
You should put up a donate button on your page… or just get really familiar with vim 
I’m thinking that 0.05 seconds to render a page is really quite good for most sites… I can’t seem to find a big forum that includes the render time in the page source.
What I’ve been thinking about, however, is that a customizable caching plugin would be really useful, especially for the really old posts that are mostly viewed via a google search. Been reading through the wp-cache2 source to see if there’s really all that much to it.
I built a SMF forum on a litespeed server yesterday and I sometimes get 0.023 page render times – it’s some crazy stuff. I didn’t even think numbers that low were possible.
SMF seems heavy in some areas but it’s completely geared for quick output. I think it’s only weakness is that it will always look a certain blocky style – but it gets the job done for any big forum requirements. Lots of mods and themes available too. And you can set it up in under 30 minutes, under 10 minutes if you’ve done it before. I’d like to see bbpress grow up to be something like that.
At some point I want to port this style to bbpress:
http://www.harzem.com/themes/preview/index.php?theme=6
Pretty sure it can be done (that’s the theme author’s site)
That doesn’t seem too difficult to believe, I ran bbpress through phped profiler and it looks like the templating makes it slightly slower than if you directly outputted the code like most other forums do.
Which does make sense… what I’ve been considering is making a theme that doesn’t use all the filters but directly outputs the data.
That theme author should seriously consider moderating his forum… there’s nothing but spam on it.
I finally found one weakness in SMF (took awhile!)
No tags/category support and no hacks/mods in sight to add the ability.. Of course few other forums have such an ability. I’ve been setting up a new SMF forum for a client just to learn it and they gave me a list of sub-forums they wanted – I was like this would have been perfect for bbpress, instead of sub-forums which are unnecessary in their case and will confusing visitors.
(ie. “photos” sub-forum which really, could be photos in any other forum, just tagged to show a topic has a photo)
I’ve discovered another interesting approach that SMF takes – their “plugins” are actually true mods where it’s a sort of “diff” file that patches the sources. Keeps it running very fast no matter how make addons you use. To a certain degree it keeps working between minor version changes (ie. 1.1.1-1.1.3) but major changes will break many of them. Still, it’s an interesting approach and very different to bbPress.
They also do virtually everything in memory as arrays (roles, etc) where bbPress runs through a big bunch of code to return a value ie. bb_current_user_can(“administrate”).
I know wordpress.org’s forum has distributed backup servers but it operates as a single server correct? I’m wondering just how far bbpress can scale on a single server. Once you offload mysql & email functions, that’s about as far as you can go easily on a single server.
Yeah, all other forums do a “diff” patch approach to creating mods, which is the main thing that drove me to use bbPress in the first place… the plugin architecture is so much simpler.
I really like the idea of making “pluggable” actions the way bbPress does, but I’m not entirely fond of the filters. In most cases I don’t use the filters in my theme, but change the theme to directly output the data.
