Quote:MyBB is a powerful, efficient and free forum package.
I was wondering how MyBB's server load compared to other forum solutions in a standard installation.
Particularly i was looking at comparisons between MyBB and:
Does anyone have any information on this?
I don't believe it's more efficient that phpBB, due to the fact MyBB has so much more already integrated. Now, as far as IPB, I know it does run better. I know it's also better than vB.
Either way, this is all speculation, as I have no real information. MyBB has been the best pick so far.
If anyone knows of a load testing tool i can use then i can do my own comparison between MyBB, phpBB and IPB 1.x
As far as phpBB 2 is concerned, that has a pretty low server load. But then again it is a pretty basic script. Now if you talk about phpBB3 (even though it is beta), the server load has obviously increased, but only in respect to complexity of the new script.
IPB 1 is hard to even consider as a valid competitor anymore since after the release of the 2.x series the 1.x became obselete. I have run boards before with IPB 2 and vBulletin, and I can tell you that both were designed to be scalable solutions that were intended to handle larger loads better. vBulletin has done a better job of this in my opinion, but that is because IPS turned Invision Board into an integrated solution that is the key to the rest of their software package whereas vB only wanted to create a forum solution.
The only other solution I would add there is Simple Machines. As much as I like the job they did with the default theme, and how I like the design of the Admin CP (outside of the horrid template editing) that software tends to be the least efficient of the boards in my opinion.
Personally I have to say that myBB is a pretty low load board up there with phpBB. Many of the inefficiencies that may exist I believe have been fixed in the 1.2 series which this board is now running and that the rest of us should see in the near future.
Also after posting I saw your other post. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell what the server load is because the load is determined by factors that cannot be actively controlled, such as the amount of people on the server, the amount of information being requested, etc.
I believe there are tools out there that will track an entire server load, but as far as doing it for individual scripts I have not heard of any.
Basically i want a stress test tool which will connect to a url on my localhost with virtual users and click around the different pages while logging the results.
I don't know of any programs or specific statistics about this, but MyBB caches various bits of information such as the forum list, usergroups, smilies, etc.
DennisTT Wrote:I don't know of any programs or specific statistics about this, but MyBB caches various bits of information such as the forum list, usergroups, smilies, etc.
Pardon the bump. Since I've been searching this forum for any possible
answer to my question regarding caching posts and threads, I saw this
and wanted to ask a sort of followup question to help me understand a
bit better.
One forum platform (vBulletin to be exact) appears to have a caching
ability or plugin wherein any threads or posts made in that thread will
create a cache page, kinda similar to WordPress' cache plugin that will
create webpages of a blog post so as to possibly lessen server load.
Possibly, anyway.
Based on that quote above, do I understand right that MyBB will do a
similar thing? Meaning it'll cache the thread or page (or rather create a
couple of webpages based on the thread) so MyBB won't have to pull
the info from the database, and thus possibly lessen the load?
MyBB doesn't cache threads or posts.
MyBB has an internal cache which stores your list of user groups, forums, and forum permissions which instead of fetching them individually it pulls them all in one hit at the start of the script - and can do it from the file system (as well as various PHP accelerators and memcached servers in MyBB 1.4) which is faster than it reading the cache from the database. It brings the load down on your database server and reduces CPU cycles because we're essentially storing information that is formatted exactly how we need it - no looping through arrays to recreate their structure or do inheritance checking (forum permissions for example)
I believe vBulletin has a time based post cache - that is instead of parsing the BB Code for posts on each page view it stores pre-compiled versions of posts in the database with an expiry date - so they can just fetch the pre-compiled version. The problem with this is that if you update your smilies or custom BB Code the post won't immediately reflect those changes - you'll have to wait to the cache expires. We plan to implement something similar in MyBB however MyBB will be intelligent enough to know when you change your smilies or BB Code and will re-cache that post on its next view. The downside to a solution like this however is that you end up using more disk space for your forums - but the argument is then, saving CPU cycles is more important than disk space, right?
In regards to a file system cache - such as what WordPress has, MyBB doesn't currently have this feature and it ends up being rather difficult to implement in to a bulletin board. Blogs and blogging applications such as WordPress are relatively simple applications - on the front end you don't really have to worry that much about a user being logged in or not, their user group and forum permissions and you don't really have much changing on the site depending on those permissions. A bulletin board on the other hand has a lot of dynamic content which changes greatly based on what groups you're a member of, if you're logged in, what permissions you have and other things and thus a full page caching system isn't really that feasible.
I'm open for any ideas people have about caching and such and we'll look in to them.
Chris
I like the new IPB 2.2 cache system uses api style
Will78 Wrote:I like the new IPB 2.2 cache system uses api style
Sorry I don't happen to own an IPB 2.2 license, and I have no idea what you're talking about. Care to explain?