Hi, all. Just wanted to confirm something:

We’re running a discussion board with bbpress that has 300 forums. Each forum has 14 subforums. We’re noticing a long load time with every click. We’ve tried running the board on a dedicated server, but it didn’t seem to improve the performance.

Is this a case where bbpress just isn’t built to handle that many forums and subforums?

Thanks for any help you might have to offer!

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 8 months ago]

It’s probably one of your plugins… can you post a list of which plugins you’re using?

Also – try installing this, so we can get a sense for how many queries you’re using – and how long they take to generate a pageview!

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-benchmark/

[@zaerl Participant 14 years, 8 months ago]

300 * 14 = 4,200 forums? You must have a very good SQL server.

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 8 months ago]

On a dedicated server, how about logging slow queries with MySQL, or finding the MySQL bottlenecks and tuning the config? With a forum that large, you’re beyond what most people are running with bbPress and it will take some work to fine tune.

[@admingsc Member 14 years, 8 months ago]

Hmm… my plugins include Akismet, BBPM, Bozo Users, and Report Posts. Akismet and Bozo are not active, however.

Chrishajer, the number of forums is going to continue to grow (perhaps to twice as large!) I’ve actually got a development team that’s saying that I need to create my own customized solution instead of using a pre-packaged discussion board tool. Do you agree?

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 8 months ago]

Hold on a sec, why do you need that many subforums?

Maybe there’s another way to handle this… I once hacked Support Forum to provide an extra set of categories. So the forums were the main categories, and Support Forum was my second set of categories (which I accessed using Views).

Then I created extra views which crossed the forums with the views. Quick example.

Here’s a forum:

http://classifieds.weddingbee.com/category/photography

Here’s a view for the second category, powered by Support Forum:

http://classifieds.weddingbee.com/view/free-offer

Here’s a cross between the two, of all the topics in that forum and also in that category:

http://classifieds.weddingbee.com/view/photography-free-offer

Could you do something similar, to reduce the number of forums you need to use at once?

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 8 months ago]

I’d be curious to see where the bottlenecks are (PHP? MySQL?) with using bbPress this way.

But johnhiler has a good point too. Where else does anything like that exist now? I’d like to see an example of such specialization.

[@admingsc Member 14 years, 8 months ago]

Johnhiler, I like the idea of using views to show the information in the way you’ve described. However, I’m planning some customized features for the board in the near future, and I think they would conflict with the approach. We did come up with a short-term solve to the speed problem, which we’ll have to see if it works or not.

Our structure is something like this:

10 level 1 forums

40 level 2 forums for each level 1

14 level 3 forums for each level 2

The main problem is that Level 1 (the landing page) takes about 20 seconds to load. We’re thinking about turning Level 1 into a static HTML webpage with 10 links to Level 2. When the user clicks a link, they’re brought to the board at Level 2, which loads in about 6 seconds. Guess we’ll see what happens.

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 8 months ago]

Six seconds on a dedicated server?! Something sounds wrong…

What are the new customized features you’re considering?