Big board VB 3.6 -> xenForo conversion blog

kontrabass

Well-known member
I thought I'd create a thread here to chronicle my efforts in converting a big VB board to xenForo in our test environment. If this thread is misplaced feel free to move it :)

My forum, TalkBass.com, has over 10 million posts and 175,000 members. I've hung on to vBulletin 3.6 for years now, and I've been delaying the VB 4 upgrade for obvious reasons. Anticipating the release of the big-board search product for XF, I wanted to start playing around with conversion.

TalkBass runs on a classic 3-server config (www, mysql, and mysql replication). I used the replication server as a sandbox for this conversion. Using a dumped copy of our DB, I started the VB 3.6 import process. I am extremely impressed by the import process. The ability to come back to resume the import in progress is superb. As is the ability to import selected assets (polls, reputation, etc).

Importing our private messages took several hours. It took 60 hours to import 700,000 threads (10 mil posts). Now, our replication server does not have the RAID 10 array or processors that our live DB server has, so I anticipate about 20 hours will be shaved off the thread import time when we do the real thing. This still leaves a 40-hour import though, so TalkBass will have to be offline for a whole weekend during the live convert.

After completing the import, XF proceeded to rebuild caches. When rebuilding thread cache, it quit with an error (out of memory). Guess I'll have to increase the PHP memory limit and try again.

More to come :)

See the converted test forum at http://www.talkbass.com/xen/index.php?categories/bass-guitar-forums.53/
 

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I'd be interested to look into what generated that out of max packet size error, but on the whole it sounds like your import is going nicely - congratulations, and welcome.
 
On average, how many users are on at a given time?

While having a lot of posts is nice, the number of users online is a more interesting number.

I'd be curious to see how your performance changes from vBulletin to Xenforo.
 
On average, how many users are on at a given time?

While having a lot of posts is nice, the number of users online is a more interesting number.

I'd be curious to see how your performance changes from vBulletin to Xenforo.

We have about 1800 users online during peak usage (15 minute cookie).
 
I'd be interested to look into what generated that out of max packet size error, but on the whole it sounds like your import is going nicely - congratulations, and welcome.

Does the attached image (first post) show you what you need, or do you need something from the http error log? I'd be happy to provide what I can.
 
Any updates on progress? Have you done the live convert yet?
We're having fun in the sandbox, but we're in a holding pattern until XF's big-board search is released (and also, until the VB importer is able to import paid subscriptions).
 
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