Migrating a large forum to XenForo (test migration)

[CTXMedia]

Fantastic migration page - and what a nut for putting a countdown timer on it - crazy (but in a good way).

Can someone screenshot the migration page as I can't do it from my iPhone and won't be behind a PC for a good few hours yet.

Good luck Deebs ...

 

[CTXMedia]

Ah ha ... forgot about iPhone screen cap - done

 

[MGSteve]

"12 processes across 4 CPUs" - I thought you were supposed to do one per core?

Nah, 1 per core didnt max out the CPU.

Interestingly, I re-ran the importer again and started 32 processes across 16 cores - it cut the import time from 35mins to 34! (4.5m posts).

 

[Andy.N]

deebs
You have over 9M posts yourself and the second poster has 33K posts?

 

[MYstIC G]

That was a manual post count edit done way back in the day so that none of the users could +1 their way to the top.

 

[Slavik]

Of course - I need to get out of the Windows way of thinking with Linux!

I'll give it a go later in the week when I re-run the importer again.

Just saw you tried my suggestion of mounting it on a ramdrive.

Very nice, thanks for testing it

 

[Deebs]

Here you go

 

[MGSteve]

Just saw you tried my suggestion of mounting it on a ramdrive.

Very nice, thanks for testing it

My pleasure - it was a cracking suggestion. It didn't come over that I was taking credit for thinking of it did it?

 

[MGSteve]

Here you go

View attachment 20382

Question is, why do you need a van when the house is next door?

 

[Deebs]

Question is, why do you need a van when the house is next door?

It's relative in the picture

 

[CTXMedia]

Seems nice and fast - how are people taking to it?

 

[Deebs]

Seems nice and fast - how are people taking to it?

Apart from a few teething issues (self inflicted!) noone has really complained but then they have had sight of the test forums since April or so. Hardest part is cleaning up the vB permissions I had to use.

 

[CTXMedia]

Hardest part is cleaning up the vB permissions I had to use.

Yeah, I'm not looking too forward to that myself either. I've consolidated usergroups as best I can, with a view to using the stacking nature of XF privs to build up access to certain features and forums, but with so many of them to work through individually it's going to be a good bit of work to get it sorted at the beginning.

Migrations are always big jobs, but you usually learn a good deal about a platform in the process.

 

[Marcus]

Apart from a few teething issues (self inflicted!) noone has really complained but then they have had sight of the test forums since April or so. Hardest part is cleaning up the vB permissions I had to use.

You should never underestimate the feeling of please don't change what we love. I am very surprised that I get overall very positive feedback from my users from my migration.

 

[MGSteve]

Yeah, I'm not looking too forward to that myself either. I've consolidated usergroups as best I can, with a view to using the stacking nature of XF privs to build up access to certain features and forums, but with so many of them to work through individually it's going to be a good bit of work to get it sorted at the beginning.

Migrations are always big jobs, but you usually learn a good deal about a platform in the process.

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that either - at least its easy to simplify the usergroups in vB before you move over to XF.

You should never underestimate the feeling of please don't change what we love. I am very surprised that I get overall very positive feedback from my users from my migration.

No-one really likes change, I've learnt that over the years, they have to be sold on it!

 

[Deebs]

Since the migration to XF last Thursday I decided to go tell Google to hammer the site for reindexing purposes. (I also have Kier's redirection scripts in place which helps). Anyway, thought I would share my Crawl Stats with you, I expect the first two graphs to jump due to the increased crawl speed but take a look at the bottom graph

 

[MGSteve]

Since the migration to XF last Thursday I decided to go tell Google to hammer the site for reindexing purposes. (I also have Kier's redirection scripts in place which helps). Anyway, thought I would share my Crawl Stats with you, I expect the first two graphs to jump due to the increased crawl speed but take a look at the bottom graph

View attachment 20576

Good to see! I've just added the code to record page load times in Google Analytics - although the stats seem rather on the long side - apparently it takes 4.5secs to load a page! Can't imagine that's right.

hmm, that doesn't seem right, seeing as the maximum load time in the data table below the graph is 600ms!

Anyway, I presume everything else with the migration went well?

 

[Deebs]

Good to see! I've just added the code to record page load times in Google Analytics - although the stats seem rather on the long side - apparently it takes 4.5secs to load a page! Can't imagine that's right.

Could that be including all the other elements which are still being loaded even tho the html has been rendered?

 

[MGSteve]

Could that be including all the other elements which are still being loaded even tho the html has been rendered?

Could be - just edited my post as I noticed the longest load time in the data table below the graph is 600ms!

Edit again - nope, something up with the table. if I sort by avg page Load time, the largest is 634ms, if i sort by pageview, the longest page load time is 3.2 seconds!

Something to look into a bit perhaps, I don't get complaints about page load times very often, so I don't think its too bad. Reason I added the code to record page load times was to compare with XF when we go live with it.

 

[CTXMedia]

Time to first render (what you see as a visitor) can be quicker than time to fully load everything - the "technical" load time ...

I'm expecting a similar result to Deebs with regard to page download time as XF seems to have a quite "light" layout - which is part of it's appeal of course.