Benchmarking forums - which is currently fastest?

[c2h5oh]

I have a quite big forum - 6k registered users, 200k posts, 300+ users on forums at the same time during peak activity.. and I'm using heavily modified & optimized phpBB known as mod by Przemo - quite a lot of the code has been rewritten, but it's still not enough.
I'm seriously thinking about moving to SMF or one of commercial solutions - IPB or vB, but first I'd like to know which is the fastest and is the difference that big? Current load is killing the server and moving to other hosting is not an option.

Did anyone see a forums benchmark/speed comparison anywhere?

[Aaron]

SMF is for sure capable of handling large forums. Have a look at http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/ for example. SMF 1.1 RC2 also supports caching software such as eAccelerator, which will reduce the load on your servers. I think you should really give it a try, it is far better than phpBB, that's for sure.

[Ben_S]

I don't beleive anyone has done an independent benchmark of the various forum softwares available, and in honesty, such a project would take a lot of time to do given the various things that would have to be measured.

What is your current hosting?

[c2h5oh]

Benchmarking forums shouldn't be that difficult.
1. Get one phpBB database (preferably a large one)
2. Import it into SMF, vB, IPB, ...
3. Create a script performing a number of tasks on forums, including writing, searching, etc and run a large number of iterations for more precise results.
4. For more accurate, real-life results try multiple threads

I'm using Business Server PRO (what a big, proud name for 360GB/year ;-) ) at home.pl (polish provider) - 99,9% users are from Poland and due to network structure I can't get a decent ping from ie Germany, so I'm basically stuck with providers with servers located in Poland.

[Ben_S]

Benchmarking forums shouldn't be that difficult.

But in reality it is given you would have to simulate say 500 users all performing different actions then perform those same actions on all the software in the same order with the same timing.

Also you need some knowledge of the softwares in order to configure them optimally, e.g. with SMF you would want to enable the caching features etc.

[c2h5oh]

But in reality it is given you would have to simulate say 500 users all performing different actions then perform those same actions on all the software in the same order with the same timing.

All you have to do is log users actions on one forum for 10-30 minutes and get action propability table, then multiple threads & random selection using that table.

Also you need some knowledge of the softwares in order to configure them optimally, e.g. with SMF you would want to enable the caching features etc.

True, but you can start with default setting and then ask the developers to tweak their own software for best performance..

[Ben_S]

All you have to do is log users actions on one forum for 10-30 minutes and get action propability table, then multiple threads & random selection using that table.

But that wouldn't work, what if you had two searches on one software and only one on another, search is generally a killer, whilst one may cause a table lock for say 20 seconds, two running at once may cause a lock for over a minute. The same actions would have to be performed in the same order with the same timing for any meaningful results.

Anyway like I said, unfortunatly noone has done any testing as things stand.

[maxxom]

You might want to check joomla.org [nofollow], go to the forums and do a search for user brad baker.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1 [nofollow]  (don't know if you can see it as non-member)

He set up the forum over there and it's one of the fastest growing I know. Once they split up with Mambo CMS the forum started from zero and that was about 15 or so month ago. He has done some research on different boards and owns a hosting company as well. I read already many well researched comments from him about scalability and ressource-consumption of different boards.

Hope that helps...

[redone]

Not many boards out there like Joomla running SMF! I agree that its an excellent example when users are looking for an example of a "big" forum.