I want to get a feeling from all of you which forums are best for a shared environment, looking at it from a web hosts point of view.

Which types of forums are best? PHP/mySQL or CGI based?

I want a forum that keeps the server load at a minimum. Therefore, which scripts are most effective in assisting with this. I know there are some forums which do not run with this in mind. Which ones are they and what language are they built in?

Your help is greatly appreciated!

HostNutt

PHP/MySQL is far better as far as server load is concerned.

For a plug in solution, phpbb is quite decent.

If you are going to run a board make sure it's php/mySQL, CGI boards are a resource hog.

I'll agree with the previous posters, but it's relative. On a lightly used board you'll prob never notice either. On a heavily trafficed board PHP and MySQL can be quite a resource hog, but a lot less than a cgi script.

Frank

After working with more than 20 forum software I suggest:


1- vBulletin (is not free -php/MySQL)
2- ibForums (free -php/MySQL)
3- phpBB (free -php/MySQL)
4- XmbForum (free -php/MySQL) 1.6 or higher


Mac

I use Woltlab Burning Board for all my forums, and it doesn't seem to effect the server load when 10 people are on them. Hopefully Rewdog will see this thread so he can give you more info on wBB and server load seeing as WHR uses it and it get's many more hits then my site does.

On a personal forum running vBulletin, I get about 80 people online at a time...

This is on a server with about 120 other customers :D

Load is pretty low 1.5 average...

vbulletin is the way to go :)

Originally posted by HostNutt
Which types of forums are best? PHP/mySQL or CGI based?

Just remember that CGI applications / scripts load the interpreter each time the script is loaded. I.e. every page. When the interpreter is a couple MB in size, this is a significant performance hit and more work for the server.

However be aware that PHP can be run in CGI mode and many people are - intentionally or not. Users of CGIWRAP for example.

I guess the simple answer is a PHP/MySQL , run in a mod_php / Apache environment, will have a lighter load on your machine than most other options and has the added advantage of being a commonly selected option.

Definitely a good PHP/SQL based board.

I recommend either phpbb or xmbforum. if you want a threaded view, go with phorum.

(These are recommendations for free forums, btw).

HostNutt,

I'm partial to phpBB ;)

To give you an idea of the load. On www.phpbb.com, there are currently 31 users on-line and the load is 0.32. During the peak hours of the day the site has 60 - 100 users and the load is between 3 - 5 normally (there is a lot of other activity on the site other than the boards).

phpbb.com does 150k - 200k pageviews per day.

It's running on a 1000 mhz PIII with 512 meg of memory.

These results might not be typical as we've done a bit of tweaking to get better preformance. It should give you an idea of what a php/mysql based board will do.

Frank

What is this tweaking you speak of? What mean this word tweak?


How's about a tut or somethin on tweaking your phpbb for max performance. Might help lots of the WHT crowd.

vBulletin is my dreamed one but phpBB2 is easy to use and it used phpLibs template format and database layer.

speed tweak
--------------------
If you use phpBB2, make sure you enable the gZip compression in control panel. It surely boost the forum speed

Another thing is, try this hack
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/viewhack.php?id=119

One more thing that you've to concern is mySQL load.

http://www.phpbb.com ( download version 2.0.1 )

Originally posted by Drewcifer
What is this tweaking you speak of? What mean this word tweak?


Tweak means changes to the Apache/MySQL config. I posted the changes a while ago on the phpbb website. I'll dig them up and post a link tomorrow.

The original poster was talking about a shared environemnt, so those tweaks (configurations) would not be availble to them (you need to have root access to change the mysql or Apache config).

Frank

Originally posted by bazet
vBulletin is my dreamed one but phpBB2 is easy to use and it used phpLibs template format and database layer.


Getting a tad off topic, but phpBB does not use phpBlib's templates or db layer.

Frank

Originally posted by ffeingol
During the peak hours of the day the site has 60 - 100 users and the load is between 3 - 5 normally (there is a lot of other activity on the site other than the boards).

phpbb.com does 150k - 200k pageviews per day.


Just another comparison :)

One of the busiest VB forum I have ever seen has at peak time up to 1000 concurrent users online. Typically, at peak time the number of concurrent users online is around 500-600. The server laod this time will usually be around 6-8 (with Linux 6.2, though with FreeBSD it seems to be much lower, still not sure why) and at around 350+ concurrent users online, the server load will be around 3. Server is P3/850 with 2GB of memory (aroun 700MB-1GB of free memory at peak times). The site is doing 139K of average daily pageviews with 980K of average daily hits.

I think I still need to tweak the mysql/apache settings, but I do think this server load number is better than yours ;)

BTW, the same site was running on a FreeBSD 4.5 on a P3/800 with 512MB of memory and even with 1000 of concurrent users online, the server load has never been more than 2 and I have the MRTG graph on the server load too ... Not sure what's so special about this FreeBSD.

cheers,
:beer:

I'll dig them up and post a link tomorrow

Sounds awesome. I'd like to see what you did! :)

Thanks everyone for your replies!

Does anyone know how you can search a server to see if there are forums running on it? What I mean is, is there some kind of tool that I can run that will tell me if there are any forums running on the server? If there is no tool, is this even possible??

Thanks again for your help...

HostNutt

the new invisionboard is pretty good, they are still sorting out a few bugs but it workds well for me

yup, ibf all the way. Very close and friendly community too.

Originally posted by HostNutt
Does anyone know how you can search a server to see if there are forums running on it? What I mean is, is there some kind of tool that I can run that will tell me if there are any forums running on the server? If there is no tool, is this even possible??


I doubt that would be possible. From the OS side, you would just see the webserver and mysql running. You could try to scan the hard drive for certain file names, but all the boards have very similar file names for the .php files (i.e. viewtopic.php, viewforum.php etc.).

Frank

well I have found that forums with 100 concurent users or more. Vbulletin for the windows platform is the best. for linux phpbb.
Again these are for forums that are doing 50K in page loads per day.

I've seen VB brought down to it's knees in windows with 889 concurrent users. but it was humming till 700+. the forum owner sent me a warning e-mail that it was going to be happening.

Mike

Originally posted by wmac
After working with more than 20 forum software I suggest:


1- vBulletin (is not free -php/MySQL)
2- ibForums (free -php/MySQL)
3- phpBB (free -php/MySQL)
4- XmbForum (free -php/MySQL) 1.6 or higher


Mac

I agree with that ranking. We all have firsthand experience with vB- this is a vB board and it always runs great with tons of people online.

as far as free boards go, i would say iB.

We use this and it's the best!

PHPBB