Large forum peformance: XenForo vs vBulletin

huanpl

New member
Hi,

Our forum has over 13 milion posts and 600-800 users online. We are considering migration from vBulletin 4.1 to XenForo. Actually we're happy with the performance of vBulletin on our setup: nginx+ php-fpm + xcache + sphinx search. However what we don't like is the direction in which vBulletin 5 is heading and XenForo looks like a nice alternative.

The question towards previous vB admins: does XenForo work faster or equally fast as vB on the same hardware setup? Does it scale for larger forums?
 
Hi,

Our forum has over 13 milion posts and 600-800 users online. We are considering migration from vBulletin 4.1 to XenForo. Actually we're happy with the performance of vBulletin on our setup: nginx+ php-fpm + xcache + sphinx search. However what we don't like is the direction in which vBulletin 5 is heading and XenForo looks like a nice alternative.

The question towards previous vB admins: does XenForo work faster or equally fast as vB on the same hardware setup? Does it scale for larger forums?

Was running VB4.0.x and moved to XenForo.

Server load dropped quite dramatically. The only major factor now is the Enhanced Search addon which is quite memory intensive (for your forum you would want to assign it 5-8gb of ram to keep it happy) however I am playing with Sphinx myself at the moment (more to experiment than anything else as I am happy with ES)
 
I've also noticed a drop in server usage. It also seems to run much faster. It just seems to run better. With every new update vBulletin just seems to get slower IMHO.
 
Yeah my forum isn't that big. But after vBulletin did that activity stream update, my site went from bad to worse. Moved to Xenforo, issue gone!

I was going to move my big community over to xenforo from vbulletin, with about 330,000+ posts, 4000 members and 6000 odd posts, as well as a few GB of images and data - but really, the site is dying (due to the TV show the site is dedicated to going off air), so when my hosting is due for renewal next year, I'm going to dump it anyway! But I'll be using xenforo for my future forums, that's for sure!
 
Our forum has over 13 milion posts and 600-800 users online.
If I were you ...
I'd buy Xenforo to test it out, see what you like and don't like (cost is low).
You'll have to research what addons you might need on top of the default xenforo.
I probably wouldn't deploy Xenforo until Feb 2013-ish when the Lawsuit issue resolves itself. (migration is time consuming = expensive).
 
OK, I will share my own experience also :).
15M post VB 4.2 Forum just converted on December 29 to XF 1.5.

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On one big board I operate, we even noticed a drop in server usage when we went from vB 3.7 (with customizations to reduce its crushing loads) to XF. I am glad we went that route, vs. going all in with vB4 and needing yet another hardware upgrade to cope with the less than efficient coding.

On that forum, we get 1500 users at peak hours, 12 million posts, and are on a single server with plenty of resources left over. Add-ons are few, as I evaluate each one to see if it has non-wasteful database queries. (After having one single add-on literally bring the forum to a halt with one poorly written query, each add-on now gets scrutinitzed before I will even consider giving it a trial run.)

XF just does things more efficient and lean, so we're maximizing our server resources wisely. In retrospect, one would have to throw an insane amount of hardware at vB4 and likely even more with vB5. Which is silly, considering XF proves a busy forum can be operated without all of that overhead.
 
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