xenForo Good for Old Computers & Slow Connections?

Chris Lawes

Chris Lawes

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Hi. I am trying to develop a good forum for a group (100 people) to use to collaborate and discuss projects. A large portion of the group is in rural India on basically 56k / dial-up connections and relatively old computers (like, up to 10-years old.)

The speed advantage of Xenforo sounds good, but will it be compatible with older browsers/computers?
Also, does the speed advantage actually apply to slow connections or is that more a server-cpu speed advantage?

I am also looking at SMF 2 and IBP 3.2, so comparisons to those in these areas would be helpful.

Thanks for your honest input
 
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Chris Lawes said:
Thanks for the advice on PunBB, looks like good software. However I'm not really aiming to be the MOST stripped down fast loading forum ever, the team who is collaborating are all media creators, video editors, photographers, journalists, writers. A lot of them are in India, but I still want to run a cool, engaging forum. I just want it to also be extra-usable by those 30% that are on crappy connections.
Click to expand...

http://punbb.informer.com/forums/forum/65/punbb-13-extensions/
http://punbb.informer.com/extensions/
 
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Chris Lawes said:
What about the ability for the user to choose from a drop-down menu of skins, one of which could be "stripped down fast-loading" theme?
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http://xenforo.com/community/misc/s...ood-for-old-computers-slow-connections.18835/

If you make the the stripped down skin yourself, you can allow it for selection.... it for sure supports user selected skins as well as setting a default skin.

You can find the link for it near the footer area here right above: Forum software by XenForo™ ©2011 XenForo Ltd
 
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Cool, I didn't realize that you could choose different skins like that. That would definitely be a good option. Not necessary (or a priority) but it would be really cool if you could have the skin change according to the visitor's internet connection hehe.
Yes PunBB definitely looks ideal for dial-up. However for myself it does not support diacritics or unicode and we need that so it's out.
 
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Well, I just crossed the bandwidth limit on my connection today. So from 2mpbs speed its down to 256kbps :( But, my xenforo installation and the xenforo.com is faster than most of the other sites. There are only few other sites faster than xenforo.com and my installation (google, all the big sites..etc). Every other site, I can notice the speed decrease due to my speed being limited. It's still broadband and I have a fairly good PC, but just me personal experience. Hope it helps :)
 
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Hi Chris, how are u.

Well I am from India, Kolkata to be precise.

I am wondering what is the location of the people you are collaborating with? Most cities and towns now have broadband. I am on a 2 Mbps connection but the general norm here is 512 Kbps in cities and 256 kbps in most small towns.

And another important point is that wireless broadband is very popular here. So if your team can afford about 1500 INR (about 21 pounds) they can buy one of those wireless broadband devices which can be plugged right in laptop usb ports. These can cost anywhere between 5-15 pounds a month depending on usage. My home town is in a remote area of Gujarat where there is no broadband so I carry a tata photon (that's the market leader wireless broadband) whenever I visit there and I manage two of my sites (one heavy VBulletin forum and one XF community) just fine. Heck, i was even posting on xenforo.com from there... The point is, I don't really see why your teams location should hamper you from buying great forum software. The only problem can be if a>your team is in a very remote area / village and b> can't afford wireless and have to entirely depend on dialup.

Even if that is the case, very little of site speed is dependent on the actual forum software. If you have an optimized server, Darkimmortal's minifier plugin, light skin and a free CDN like cloudflare, your site on xenforo will run perfectly fine even on 56K dialup.
 
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Hi Sadikb.
Most of the team-members who are on lowspeed connections are in West Bengal, near Kolkata but in very rural areas like Santipur, Nabadwip, and Virabhadrapur. I just came back from there myself, and I had a Tata Photon+, MTS Mblaze, and a Vodaphone stick. None of them went above 30 kbps download (usually around 20) while I was in the rural areas. I had to go to Krishnanager to get "3G" speed and even then it was very subpar, if you have a Tata you know Tata's famous customer service and reliability!

But I see what you are saying, even with 20-30kbps dl you can still use a modern forum software. I just get a lot of complaints from those in the area about how slow my wordpress sites and other things operate for them so I'm trying to cover all of my bases and say that I tried. I will look into further the minifier plugin and a good skin. I'm loving XenForo so far!
 
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ankurs said:
hosts your sites in india, then you will get least issues as response time will be much better

try hostgator.in , they recently started offering hosting in india
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Definitely not recommended. Most of them are resellers and crappy.

Chris Lawes said:
Hi Sadikb.
Most of the team-members who are on lowspeed connections are in West Bengal, near Kolkata but in very rural areas like Santipur, Nabadwip, and Virabhadrapur. I just came back from there myself, and I had a Tata Photon+, MTS Mblaze, and a Vodaphone stick. None of them went above 30 kbps download (usually around 20) while I was in the rural areas. I had to go to Krishnanager to get "3G" speed and even then it was very subpar, if you have a Tata you know Tata's famous customer service and reliability!

But I see what you are saying, even with 20-30kbps dl you can still use a modern forum software. I just get a lot of complaints from those in the area about how slow my wordpress sites and other things operate for them so I'm trying to cover all of my bases and say that I tried. I will look into further the minifier plugin and a good skin. I'm loving XenForo so far!
Click to expand...

Ah i see. Yes in those rural areas, with Tata photon and others you will get close to dialup speeds. Still, if you use a graphic less site and use cloudflare (they have a node in asia i believe) and use optimized hosting, with about 20-30 kbps too normal posting should be fine. The problem though is you mentioned videos and images right? Well there is absolutely no way in the world you can get people to see videos or do heavy image uploading / downloading at those speeds.

I am not fully sure about your requirements and capabilities but I have another suggestion. The company I used to work for earlier installed business ERP applications and usually the plants/ factories were located at remote locations with similar connection problems. What we finally did was develop a client desktop application which used to reside on the plant or factory site. The daily transactions would all happen by users connecting to this local application. At the end of the day at a specified time (usually post midnight) a cron job would run which would connect this local computer server to the main server and transfer the data to the main application where it would be processed. I know it all sounds complicated but it's actually very simple and something similar can be designed for your website, where you can have a local copy of your site hosted on a computer in say Kolkata or one of the towns and you can have a script which does a data transfer to the main site at fixed intervals. Of course this is assuming you can do with interval based updates.

Hope this helps...
 
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Cloudfare looks very very interesting, allthough I still don't get how it works. They host mirrors of my content somehow like an Amazon CDN? And what do you mean by use optimized hosting?
As far as videos and images, well those will mostly be links to videos and images. And obviously those who are on a slow connection aren't going to even bother clicking on that stuff because they know it'll take ages to load. Threads that have a lot of pictures embedded directly into the thread, well, that just is what it is..

So then I would need to have a server in the village with a local copy of the forum on it, and people could access it locally (meaning actual LAN ethernet locally) and upload download etc. and then the local copy would sync up overnight with the online server and be up to date in the morning with downloads and uploads. Is that what you're saying?
Sounds very cool and not a bad idea, we did have a server setup in our main hub at one point, and it would do large file transfers for us overnight if we needed to send something HUMONGOUS, like 800mb or something ;)
 
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Chris Lawes said:
Cloudfare looks very very interesting, allthough I still don't get how it works. They host mirrors of my content somehow like an Amazon CDN?
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Yes they are just a glorified CDN... :)

Chris Lawes said:
And what do you mean by use optimized hosting?
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Basically most shared hosting servers are terribly configured and oversold. Apache runs on a default install with dozens of useless modules eating up memory and php running on mod_php. I am not saying that I know of any shared hosts that optimize for performance but assuming we had on a dedicated server then we could strip down Apache to load modules we need, run php thru FastCGI, get an opcode cache, have MySQL caching properly setup and if required deliver static files through nginx or lighthttpd... Well that's how my server is configured and I am running about 8 high traffic sites on a 4GB dual core machine. One can go another extra mile and get varnish up and running with apache and if you also have a CDN, your site would fly faster than the latest Mars rover! ;)

Unfortunately I really am not aware of any shared host which does all that.

Chris Lawes said:
As far as videos and images, well those will mostly be links to videos and images. And obviously those who are on a slow connection aren't going to even bother clicking on that stuff because they know it'll take ages to load. Threads that have a lot of pictures embedded directly into the thread, well, that just is what it is..
Click to expand...

Yes at the end of the day, no matter how fast your site is, it's the total data to be transferred versus the transfer speed of the visitor which determines how much time it's gonna take. Most web pages these days are in the order of several hundred Kbs. That is why something like PunBB has an advantage in your case since the entire page size is really small. Given that your visitors are unlikely to get speeds in excess of 50-60kbps even with wireless, unfortunately you may have to see something like PunBB as a serious option.

Chris Lawes said:
So then I would need to have a server in the village with a local copy of the forum on it, and people could access it locally (meaning actual LAN ethernet locally) and upload download etc. and then the local copy would sync up overnight with the online server and be up to date in the morning with downloads and uploads. Is that what you're saying?
Sounds very cool and not a bad idea, we did have a server setup in our main hub at one point, and it would do large file transfers for us overnight if we needed to send something HUMONGOUS, like 800mb or something ;)
Click to expand...

You need someone who is good enough to design the system, but that's essentially what I was saying. People access the local copy of the site through LAN in the village. All it needs is a simple PC and a wireless router and your LAN network is setup. So have these LANs in all the villages where your team members are. Then have your main site ready and setup wherever you host it. Next, make an exact copy of your site and set it up on each of your local village servers. Next write a PHP script, which runs at your local servers after each fixed interval, reads the site database , then connects to the main site and does a database insert say in a database for that village. Same for every village. Then on your main server, you have to have another script that reads the all the incoming data and intelligently updates the main site. Of course there is the technicality of ensuring IDs don't overlap and proper syncing happens with each update, but those are details which can be worked out. Of course, all of this is assuming that your needs justify having such a setup.
 
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