MyBB Community Forums

A technician in our group has looked at the source code and reports

techhead Wrote:I've had a look at both of Phorum and MyBB's search algo's. As far as I can see they basically do full table scans of the post table. This is an order of magnitude worse that what phpBB does. The only way that you could get adequate performance here would be if you allocated enough RAM to allow MySQL to cache the entire posts table. That's about 0.5Gbyte in the case of OOoF's current knowledgebase.

OOoF refers to a forum being used as a model for estimating our capacity requirements.

I have no way of responding to the comments without undertaking a long period of study first. Can anyone comment? He is essentially saying that myBB would have significantly greater system requirements than phpBB.

If you have a large forum you should be making use of MySQLs FULLTEXT support for searching and not using the standard searching capabilities. You can switch between them and this will cause MyBB to switch in to FULLTEXT mode.

The standard script is still useful, however, for smaller forums but if you want power, flexibility and speed you should be using the FULLTEXT functionality.

Thank you for the information. I take it that the RAM requirement using FULLTEXT is lower than would be the case using the standard script.

Yes,

The searching would then be shifted off to MySQL and MySQL maintains the full text index (similarly to how Google works - it indexes the words on a page and searches that index when you search, not searching through the content of entire pages stored)

You can read more about it in the MySQL manual: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/f...earch.html

Thank you again.