Vanilla2 performance

david111

Hi, I know Vanilla2 is still in beta, but I'd like to consider it as a replacement for a (sometimes high traffic) vBulletin forum and I was wondering about the current state of V2 performance-wise and HW requirements for switching to V2. I still have troubles doing meaningful, fair benchmarks for both softwares.

What does it better and what does it worse than VB, at webserver and database level ? What performance features are mandatory for a production forum but still missing ?

Thanks for any hint !

Regards,

David

Stash

I can't answer any of those questions for you I'm afraid - and I would say it's going to be pretty difficult to know exactly what it's going to be like until the software goes final, or at least close to.

Perhaps @Mark has some benchmarking data that he would be willing to share at this point?

Mark

We are still working through the scaling code. It generally FAR outperforms Vanilla 1. We haven't benchmarked it against any other forum solutions. We are working with some large clients at handling some pretty crazy scale, but those people always inevitably need some customizations implemented (like memcached, etc).

As Stash said - we'll have some more solid data after it goes final.

david111

Thanks for the information. I did a test of unauthenticated forum browsing (take it with a _big_ grain of salt) between vB and V2 (git from last week, using an older database imported from vB), using 1 vm for webserver and 1 vm for database (both with 4 beefy vcpu and plenty of ram).

V2 won with 102 req/s against 36 for vB. Only PHP pages, no static (js/css/png/...) ones. The V2 pages are currently much lighter than our (somewhat customized) vB pages.

Webserver CPU was the bottleneck for both (vB received like 10 times more data from MySQL than V2 and spent some more time with softirq handling and context switching).

DB cpu usage was around 25% for both. Funny to see how the CPU activity differs regarding to user/system/softirq though.

Remember, take that with a grain of salt, there 3 kind of lies, yadda yadda ... It was PHP 5.2.12 with XCache (APC is slightly faster), under Apache 2.2 on CentOS 5 (32 bits for web and 64 for db). MySQL server was a Percona build (5.0.87-b20). Virtualization provided by ESX 4 (VMware).

Good luck with your scaling efforts ! Anything that can spare some CPU on the frontend and that you can release "soon" will be appreciated (and tested

Stash

/me takes a handful of salt

Good to see the preliminary results showing a payoff for the "vanilla by design" principals of V2. It will be interesting to see how plugins change the results...

Out of interest, could you run that test for V1? I doubt you can due to a lack of importer probably...

Mark

@david111 - Cool! Thanks for letting us know about that. We've got some pretty cool caching stuff that will likely come out with the RC that should help significantly.

david111

Sorry Stash, I won't be able to test with V1 But I will be back when RC is out

TimothyG

@Mark, all

Any updates on the Vanilla 2 performance #'s?

I ask because some folks over at FluxBB are talking smack about Vanilla, and providing performance #'s stating how Vanilla is dog slow.

Regardless, you guys rock and I've been loving Vanilla 2 since the release!

garymardell

@TimothyG It seems that this is compared to the old vanilla 1 not vanilla 2 for a start. Vanilla 1 was known to be slower if you had whispers enabled due to the complex queries. I'd like to see the test again but with vanilla 2.

JamesJames

All

Can someone update the test for Vanilla 2, as seen in TimothyG post above.

I would myself but unfortunately, am not skilled enough to know how.

Raize

It's not slow for me, that's all that matters

Raize

In fact it's extremely efficient at doing what it does

Mark

Vanilla 2 is leagues faster than Vanilla 1 was, and the stats they're showing there are related to Vanilla 1. It is worth noting that Vanilla 2 is a completely different codebase that was written from the ground up with speed being one of our main concerns.

Because we are running the hosting service at VanillaForums.com, speed is a constant concern of ours, and we're continually making changes for speed improvements. We have a long list of things on our list to help in this regard. So, it is fast now, and it is going to continue to get faster.