Large forum peformance: XenForo vs vBulletin

[huanpl]

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?

 

[Digital Doctor]

all three load rather nicely

all three seem quite fast to me.

 

[TPerry]

I looked, out of curiosity...all three load rather nicely. Nice job on the themes BTW!

Thanks.. the IPS one is basically default with some slight color changes (so far).

What, no vB5?

I don't believe in abusing hardware.

 

[Wildcat Media]

I don't believe in abusing hardware.

Or making your web hosting company rich.

I would hate to think what hardware we'd be running now under even vB4. vB5? Forget it. I never upgraded 3.7 since I had to customize it to play nice under large loads. Even from that old version, our resource usage dropped when we moved to XF in Nov. 2012. I have issues with the add-ons, but the basic XF product itself has performed beyond my expectations.

We hit 1800 users on a single dedicated server with XF. It may have been more--that was only when I peeked in to look. We did have an issue with speeds, but it turns out there was an Apache adjustment needed. (Can't recall right now, but it had to do with max clients.) Once that was switched, pages were loading perfectly again. You wouldn't think we had that much of a load at the time!

My only regret over the years was abusing @eva2000 with all of my optimization requests. And often the answer was to throw more hardware at the problem.

 

[TPerry]

but it turns out there was an Apache adjustment needed. (Can't recall right now, but it had to do with max clients.) Once that was switched, pages were loading perfectly again. You wouldn't think we had that much of a load at the time!

Dump Apache and transfer over to LiteSpeed (for paid) or nginx and you will be even more surprised. If you use cPanel, then you will pretty much have to use LiteSpeed.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Apache loads XF pages in a fraction of a second currently. No complaints.

 

[TPerry]

Apache loads XF pages in a fraction of a second currently. No complaints.

It's not just the "speed" but the speed under load and resource usage.