Biggest Existing Board that has Migrated to xF?

[MGSteve]

I've done a test run through of mine,

371,568 threads,
4m posts,
55,000 users

I pruned off all the inactive users with no activity & no posts in the last 12 months, pruned off all the banned accounts over 12 months old and removed all the accounts awaiting activation over 12 months old.

So, we pruned off about 1200 posts & 30,000 user accounts (!!) The forum is 8 years old, so a fair amount of junk in there, to be quite honest.

Here's the import screen, so you can see the times. The server in this case was my desktop W7 machine (Core i7 @ 3.6Ghz, 12GB Ram, Raptor HDD), but as others have said, load is pretty minimal during transfer. It was markedly slower (posts alone took 8 hours) the first time through when the Web server was on one server and the DB was my desktop. It may well be worth doing the migration with the web server & DB on the same box and then move the web files off onto the normal server if you have them separate.


The only thing I can't do is rebuild the search indexes at the moment as there is a bug in b5.

The attachments speed was hampered by the files being on the file server, so there was some LAN overhead there. It should be quicker if they're on the same machine.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Yer, but for anyone using 4.x... xenforo beta is far better than what their running

True! I'm actually going to convert a live SMF 2 forum in the coming week, although it's not very big as of yet. But, it has potential, as it could drain away visitors from the "big board" I've been running for awhile now. And I have a couple of site launches that I will be tying into it as well.

 

[craigiri]

True! I'm actually going to convert a live SMF 2 forum in the coming week, although it's not very big as of yet. But, it has potential, as it could drain away visitors from the "big board" I've been running for awhile now. And I have a couple of site launches that I will be tying into it as well.

Interesting - that quickie suite of tests shows SMF2 is quite fast - beating out everything else in that benchmark.
May I ask why you are converting?

 

[Wildcat Media]

Interesting - that quickie suite of tests shows SMF2 is quite fast - beating out everything else in that benchmark.
May I ask why you are converting?

Development on SMF has been stagnant. From what I understand, the core group of developers splintered off, and they really haven't developed it much in the past couple of years. The current version 2 has been in beta and RC status for years now. I already got burned with phpBB2 being stale for so long--it has so many shortcomings compared to vB that I've added at least two dozen modifications to make it usable (IMHO). And phpBB3 to me has an overly complicated admin system, compared to what I had become used to in vB3.5 and higher. All I need is to convert all my other forums over to SMF, then have them stop development similar to how phpBB sat for years untouched.

At least xF is on a forward path. And it's more current with the trends in social media, user interface and web technology. It also has a more robust admin interface than SMF, at least in my opinion. It does more of what I need a forum to do. It also has one helluva development team behind it.

 

[Deebs]

Did a fresh import test over the last few days. Server specs:

SQL Server: Percona-Server-5.5.13-rel20.4 with XtraDB running on a quad core 2.2ghz, 16gig RAM, 2 x Samsung 1tb drives in software raid 1, Centos 5.5.
Web server: Nginx 1.05, 4gig RAM, 4 x 2.6ghz processors, 2 x Samsung 1tb drives in software raid 1, Ubuntu 11.04

Total time to import 3.9 million posts and 13,000 users = approx 9 hours. This did not include any cache rebuilding like the search index. Purely the import process within XF.

Observations:

MySQL was not taxed, most of the processing time was within PHP utilising a single core, understandable as the client will only ever call a single PHP process on the webserver.
Whilst the import was happening the main website was still open to users and generating pages in 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. IOW, no delay (obviously during the live migration I will shutdown the main site).
After the import I did about 90 minutes of additional work to create the new styles, install and configure plugins and rework the layout of the forums.
Everything that XF 1.04 imports imported perfectly. No cleanups required.
To rebuild the search index took around 3 hours and without a page delay of at least 5 seconds impacted the live site. ie, disk i/o was saturated, not CPU. During my live migration I will add a delay of around 10-15 seconds between each batch to even out the disk i/o.

Hope this is useful to those planning to migrate similar sized forums to XF.

 

[tmb]

Tonight we are finally taking the plunge. We are migrating from SMF with vB as an intermediary. We built a few custom scripts to pull passwords and leave redirects behind. Test import we ran awhile back took a long time so planning on being down through Sunday.

We are moving 96k topics and over 4.8 mill posts. We lost over a million in a database corruption last year so I guess it might make things a little easier on us now. Glad to finally do this before we add the 200k posts per month on again. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[tmb]

Thought I should share my experiences from migrating this weekend.

We closed down Fri night around 11pm. We ran the import into impex from SMF. This process took till around 4 pm the next day. We ran into a little trouble because of a dumb mistake on our part that we got fixed thanks to some great help from people here. We then got to importing into xen around 9pm. This import only took 9 or so hours.

We have a lot of hidden forums and setting everyone back up on their usergroups was a massive pain and one of the few negatives I've found with this software. That took a few hours, and really still isn't quite done.

We have an issue with a piece of custom work we did (we stripped out avatars and replaced them with topic icons) but other than that its been great in the 15 hours or so its been open. It is so much quicker and hopefully after we clean up our databases we see even more speed gains that will stop us from adding a 2nd dedicated box anytime soon.

Its been very well received now that people are getting used to the major shock of learning a new system. Looking forward to more core additions and great add-ons from the community here.

Those coming straight over from vB with big boards should not worry at all, its very quick. These are our stats:
Discussions: 96,110
Messages: 4,906,552
Members: 11,289

 

[lazy llama]

We migrated at the weekend as well, as mentioned on the Big Bigger Biggest thread

Discussions: 278,346
Messages: 10,346,335
Members: 40,492

As tmb says, it's very fast, despite our modest server. The only performance issue we had turned out to be down to an add-on which has been diabled until the author sorts out the problem.

 

[Paul B]

We have a lot of hidden forums and setting everyone back up on their usergroups was a massive pain and one of the few negatives I've found with this software.

In what respect?

The permission system in my opinion is one of, if not the easiest I have ever used.

The private node function in particular is extremely useful for private forums and requires just a few clicks to set up multiple user groups.

 

[tmb]

In what respect?

The permission system in my opinion is one of, if not the easiest I have ever used.

The private node function in particular is extremely useful for private forums and requires just a few clicks to set up multiple user groups.

When you click on a user group it would make sense to have a way to quickly add members into that usergroup, not have to do it from the user side. It may be an issue of familiarity of how your used to things being done but to me its a much easier and intuitive way to do it.

 

[Deebs]

When you click on a user group it would make sense to have a way to quickly add members into that usergroup, not have to do it from the user side. It may be an issue of familiarity of how your used to things being done but to me its a much easier and intuitive way to do it.

Agreed, I miss that. If I click a usergroup I want to see the members of that group and have the ability to add members to the usergroup.

 

[Dean]

When you click on a user group it would make sense to have a way to quickly add members into that usergroup, not have to do it from the user side. It may be an issue of familiarity of how your used to things being done but to me its a much easier and intuitive way to do it.

I've found it helps to have multiple tabs open, sometimes 2 tabs for the admincp (one with usergroups / usergroup permission), and another for searching for users in the admin cp. And sometimes a 3rd tab to search for members and their content from the members tab in the forum itself.

 

[dbembibre]

Im planning to migrate my forums bmwfaq.com with (thread: 551,619, Posts: 10,017,907, users: 59,625) to xenforum but my biggest problem right now is related to vBSEO, i dont want to lost my 2 million of posts indexed by google.