Anyone got any kind of stats/info about speed/performance/scalability?

[entelechy]

Hi Guys,

Just joined because I'm thinking of using Xenforo for a site and wanted to get some advice about what the performance of Xenforo is like compared to comp (particluarly stats or solid details would be great).

I've read anecdotally that Xenforo performs really well, but wanted to delve a bit deeper if poss.

 

[Vekseid]

This depends a lot on what you intend to do.

I have run and hosted a large number of forums

- Three forums in MyBB, two at around 100k posts and one at ~2M posts (about to convert to Xenforo)
- Several forums in SMF, the largest at ~15M posts (going to convert to Elkarte)
- Three Xenforo forums, the largest at over 500k posts
- Several phpBB forums, the largest at over 500k posts (converted to MyBB).

1) The weight of raw requests to the forum itself. Often, this is negligible except for poorly designed software. bbPress is the only one that ever struck me as a serious offender here. For software that still uses standard pagination, that means it's still using offset, and until forum devs get away from fixed page starting points this is always going to hurt. There are other ways forum software can screw up, however.

2) The weight of integrating and extending forum functionality. This is relevant when considering things like live/active notification, chats, and so on. I feel like Xenforo is close to the top here but not the fastest.

3) The quality of the database design and how well it scales. Xenforo does pretty good here - it's a modern design whereas most previous software has a lot of cruft built on the expectations of 20 years ago.

Right now my MyBB forum is collapsing under its own weight, and performance is a big part of why I'm moving it to Xenforo. It's a fraction of the size of my SMF forum, with fewer active features, but it just cannot keep up even though it's on the same hardware.

It's hard to give a hard estimate as to Xenforo's performance because the main forum I have to compare it to insists on using a lot of comparatively inefficient addons. Chats that don't bother checking if the window is active, etc. Despite this, it is certainly outperforming MyBB at scale.

In a few months after I get things running I'll be in a much better position to compare SMF/Elkarte to Xenforo performance wise.

 

[entelechy]

Thanks for your reply - Just from taking quite a quick look the overall UI of Xenforo looks more modern than other forums as well. Considering that the site I'm going to launch is in the tech space, this matters quite a bit. Really I just wanted to check that Xenforo generally performed better than most.
Out of curiosity and being that you're operating so many different forums - is there some sort of guidelines you go by with regards to required hosting? Do you have dedicated or VPS for all of them.. Is there some way know the right level of upgrading to have done to your servers as well? Or do you just upgrade as you need?

Thanks again - awesome insight

 

[Vekseid]

Prior to SSDs becoming commonplace VPSes would murder any reasonably active forum, so I've been strictly running my own servers for years. Back then properly dividing out CPU time was also problematic for the most common VPS providers, which caused its own issues. VPSes can also end up with very weird issues still... I deal with VMWare professionally and sometimes you get some insane headscratchers.

A VPS these days is fine for most people, just make sure they are not running Virtuozzo, and make sure you are on an SSD.

Specifically, even if you want to start smaller, make sure your VPS can dedicate CPUs to you. If you outgrow shared hosting, you'll probably want two CPUS fairly quickly, and enough RAM to hold a significant fraction of your database.

Much further gets into how to monitor these things, but you'll want to learn how to distinguish between your CPU getting topped out and thrashing due to low RAM. Novels can and have been written about optimization, etc. I get a lot more out of my hardware than most people do.

 

[entelechy]

Interesting insight - I'm new to forum management so haven't fully considered the impact of a VPS to dedicated yet. Any references to those novels you mentioned that I can take a look at - very keen to learn as much as poss about optimization as the platform I'm intending on launching should have north of 500,000 users and high activity levels within 12 months, and I've managed sites before which suffered because of a poor hosting plan early on.

 

[Vekseid]

I put all of my documentation on a website - https://hexwiki.com/wiki/Debian_Wheezy - but it's five years old at this point and pre-systemd. I tend to upgrade with hardware and am currently waiting on Spectre fixes before I revisit this. Though I work on CentOS professionally so I suppose I could make a guide for that.

You can also hire someone, but the best people are not cheap.