MyBB Community Forums

I need a forum which can handle well with over 3500 forums. I have been testing several other forums such as PunBB, phpBB, SMF, WBB, IPB. WBB is able to handle all 3500 forums, but is not able to handle setting group permissions to all these. All the others have failed to cope even loading.

MyBB does handle loading 3500 forums and is able to handle the group permissions. For testing purposes I have set the home page to load all sub-forums so all the 3500 forums are shown on the home page. As you would expect when loading the home page it uses 58MB of memory. I assume this is because the SQL query is so large?

What I don't understand, when you go into a sub-forum that doesn't contain any posts or other sub-forums, why it still uses 58MB to load the page? Other pages like private messages, whos online, and other pages that don't list any forums, also use the same amount of memory. Why is this?

I will eventually be using memcache but I would like to get the memory usage down to a "reasonable" figure before adding this. How can I optimise the forum so it isn't using 58MB of memory for all pages?

For reference purposes, I am using the standard template, no plugins or mods, there are no posts, and no registered users.

Why does it need this many O.o

I think it is more related to how big your caches are. 3500 forums plus factor in permissions and you can get a very large cache. You might try putting passwords so you don't need as many usergroups.

Yes, the problem is the cache. Forum info and forum permissions are cached to save queries for them on every single page, but with boards with this many forums, the caches, mainly the forumpermissions one, can get huge. There is another user with a similar issue and I've planned to write a plugin to change how the permissions work a bit. Can I ask specifically what permissions you're setting for each forum??

(2011-05-27, 06:08 PM)Darth Stabro Wrote: [ -> ]Why does it need this many O.o

I just do I was originally going to write my own in PHP/MySQL but I could never make something as complex as MyBB, plus I don't really have time. In the end I decided to install a php forum and modify it.

(2011-05-27, 06:32 PM)dragonexpert Wrote: [ -> ]I think it is more related to how big your caches are. 3500 forums plus factor in permissions and you can get a very large cache. You might try putting passwords so you don't need as many usergroups.

There aren't special groups setup yet. Regarding the cache, if I enable "Send No Cache Headers" the memory usage remains the same when viewing any pages.

(2011-05-27, 07:05 PM)AndrewGB Wrote: [ -> ]Regarding the cache, if I enable "Send No Cache Headers" the memory usage remains the same when viewing any pages.

That's just to stop output like CSS and javascript being cached by your browser, that's not related to the forum cache.

(2011-05-27, 06:53 PM)MattRogowski Wrote: [ -> ]Yes, the problem is the cache. Forum info and forum permissions are cached to save queries for them on every single page, but with boards with this many forums, the caches, mainly the forumpermissions one, can get huge. There is another user with a similar issue and I've planned to write a plugin to change how the permissions work a bit. Can I ask specifically what permissions you're setting for each forum??

Just the default permissions, there are no special groups or permissions.

Can I fully disable the cache?

I mean what specific permissions are you setting... is it the same permission every time for every forum for example??

No, you can't disable it, as we don't have anything there to make it run loads more queries on every page instead. My plugin might help though if I knew what permissions you were setting.

All the forums have the same inherited permissions.
Guests / Awaiting / Banned: Can only view the forum, nothing else.
Members / Moderators / Admins: View, post, reply, search, polls, attachments.
Sure you don't want me to post the permissions for each group?

(2011-05-27, 07:09 PM)MattRogowski Wrote: [ -> ]That's just to stop output like CSS and javascript being cached by your browser, that's not related to the forum cache.

No, MyBB has no influence on static files like images or Javascript.

(2011-05-27, 07:09 PM)AndrewGB Wrote: [ -> ]Can I fully disable the cache?

No, it would require a lot of extra queries. 3500 forums are really exceptional, MyBB is not supposed to handle it.