Hi all,

I am currently preparing an article for a computer magazine in switzerland. I is about building communities in PHP and I would like to know if anybody can tell me which of the popular forum software products do use less resources.

I have heard that boards like UBB, YaBB, ultimateBBS are not allowed at some hosts because they use too much resources.

Can anybody tell me something about it?

Thanks

Marian

Well, its subject to a lot of things... UBB is written mostly in perl, even with the php wrappers, so it would be the hog.

Some forums run well with low traffic but tend to go mad when the load gets high. If you had to look at forum systems, it would be best to check the other main ones, besides you listed.. vBulletin, phpBB, XMB and Ikonboard.

We have a customer using the cgi version of Ikonboard and it takes ALOT of resources. He's switching to a php board at the end of the month. I've never used the php version if Ikonboard.

I hardly think that just because something is written in Perl it would take more resources than PHP. If a script is written poorly, it will most likely use more resources than it should, doesn't matter if it's Perl, PHP, C, or whatever. The reason IkonBoard is a resource hog is because it uses flat file database. You can just imagine how much resources it takes to open god know how many files, read the whole file, change one line (or even one character), then write the whole file again.

So very true, i wrote a shell program last week that sucked the heck out of my server - why cause it read and rewrote numersoue files (hi disk i/o = high CPU overhead).

Essentialy it all comes down to the way a program is designed and coded. Like Saeed pointed out.

Allbe of most forums out their , phpBB is probly one of the most resource friendly.

Be sure to include the newest, and potentially the best PHP board out now... Invision Board (http://www.invisionboard.com). They just released their first beta, but it looks to be very promising.

had a proprietary php board, pulling from a mysql database. site had 5200 registered users and pushed about 50gb a month. cpu would go to 2-2.5 at peak, but other than that was alright.

heddesheimer,

Feel free to contact me off-line (email, PM, IM). I'm the sysadmin for www.phpbb.com so I can give you quite a bit of details about phpbb :D.

Frank