3 ms·

I love how fast it is. I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so t

I love how fast it is. I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so terrible. I can certainly understand how the first versions would be not so great, but the authors released many new versions over the years that tweaked the styling and added a few features but the performance was always awful. Seems like if the authors had put their minds to it those forums could have been super fast, which everyone would have loved because slow forums translated into bigger hosting costs...

Aloha 4y ago
Most of them were on overloaded shared hosting boxes. I know this because I worked for hosting providers in that era.
- slotrans 4y ago
  Oh for sure. But doesn't that increase the returns to making the code more efficient? I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
  - anthonyhn 4y ago
    >I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate). https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer
- RajT88 4y ago
  Yep. That's how it went with my friends and I hosting phpBB for many years on a linux-based hosting provider. When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month. It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.

Aloha 4y ago

Most of them were on overloaded shared hosting boxes. I know this because I worked for hosting providers in that era.

slotrans 4y ago
Oh for sure. But doesn't that increase the returns to making the code more efficient? I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
- anthonyhn 4y ago
  >I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate). https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer
RajT88 4y ago
Yep. That's how it went with my friends and I hosting phpBB for many years on a linux-based hosting provider. When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month. It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.