Vanilla on Large forums?
Hello,
I've been reading the forum for a while looking for examples of Vanilla being used on Large forums.
We have a large community and are considering to make the switch to Vanilla. To see some examples of others doing the same will help a lot.
Will appreciate very much if you can give examples of Large forums running Vanilla.
Also, do you have experience or can share me some tips on technical details we need to take care about?
We run a phpBB community with:
300.000 pageviews a day.
1 thousand new topics each day
4 million posts.
2 million registered users.
To see examples and gather experience from you is one of my concerns right now on this quest.
Thanks!
Best Answers
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peregrine
MVP
I haven't seen anyone post anything comparable to the number of pageviews or posts that you have mentioned. It would be great if more people posted if the number of posts exceeded a few 100 per day and views were over 100,000.
from a search of pageviews nothing reported so far approximates what you want to do. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but you would probably want to change search capabilities and change more of the field structure to innodb, and caching software and nginx, and varnish, And watch out for plugins that may be performance killers on large-scale sites.
http://vanillaforums.org/search?adv=&search=pageviews
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/167106/#Comment_167106
perhaps you could create a test forum and run siege tests against. it.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
5 -
Linc
Admin
@mauricio It's definitely possible. At that scale, the vanillaforums.com hosted solution would save you a bunch of time & money. Otherwise, you'd want to implement Varnish, memcached, and likely APC (or Zend Opcache). You will need Spinx for search. Avoid addons with custom queries unless you deeply understand what they're doing.
6 -
R_J
Admin
You can choose more than one comment as an answer.
Maybe that one is a good starting point for evaluations: https://github.com/kasperisager/vagrant-lnpp
I think if your looking for a forum centric solution, Vanilla is a great start. It is a mature forum based on a great framework. You'll see that it is easily extensible. Documentation is a weak point, but that is worked on: http://docs.vanillaforums.com/ But if you are a developer, you'll soon find out that Vanillas source is very well documented and thus always a valuable help.
The community must seem lousy small for someone coming from phpBB but it is very responsive and here are some really good software developers around.
5
Answers
I know of a couple who have come from phpBB to Vanilla Forums hosted. I will send you more details about it via PM, but maybe someone here can comment on their open source experience.
I know @phreak runs a few large scale Vanilla forums.
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I haven't seen anyone post anything comparable to the number of pageviews or posts that you have mentioned. It would be great if more people posted if the number of posts exceeded a few 100 per day and views were over 100,000.
from a search of pageviews nothing reported so far approximates what you want to do. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but you would probably want to change search capabilities and change more of the field structure to innodb, and caching software and nginx, and varnish, And watch out for plugins that may be performance killers on large-scale sites.
http://vanillaforums.org/search?adv=&search=pageviews
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/167106/#Comment_167106
perhaps you could create a test forum and run siege tests against. it.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
@mauricio It's definitely possible. At that scale, the vanillaforums.com hosted solution would save you a bunch of time & money. Otherwise, you'd want to implement Varnish, memcached, and likely APC (or Zend Opcache). You will need Spinx for search. Avoid addons with custom queries unless you deeply understand what they're doing.
Since most addons run custom queries to add features, I would say "review every addon before using it". Custom queries are not a sign of a "risky" plugin, their absence is not a guarantee of a good plugin.
My shop | About Me
Thanks all for your insightful answers.
It's a pitty not to see somebody commenting his own experience with a Large forum, but we are willing to do our own tests on that.
Special thanks to @peregrine and @linc for listing technologies we need to pay attention to. We'll setup our first testing enviroment this week and start playing with load tests.
I'll keep you posted on what we discover.
Our main concerns at this point are: scalability, and how much effort will it take to build the features we need with Vanilla.
Thanks!
How should I rate the answers? I can pick just one as the Answer or can I choose many? Thanks!
You can choose more than one comment as an answer.
Maybe that one is a good starting point for evaluations: https://github.com/kasperisager/vagrant-lnpp
I think if your looking for a forum centric solution, Vanilla is a great start. It is a mature forum based on a great framework. You'll see that it is easily extensible. Documentation is a weak point, but that is worked on: http://docs.vanillaforums.com/ But if you are a developer, you'll soon find out that Vanillas source is very well documented and thus always a valuable help.
The community must seem lousy small for someone coming from phpBB but it is very responsive and here are some really good software developers around.
Thanks again to all for the answers.
What about MySQL replication? In our past experience MySQL replication has been very important to make our forum scale.
Does Garden Database model supports MySQL replication at this time?
I know it will in 2.3 (not released yet); I'm unsure about 2.1. For what it's worth, we're hosting some of the largest forums in the world without needing replication.
what are some of the largest page view stats and new posts, and comments per day.
and the largest number of registered users and discussions and comment counts overall.
for some of vanilla hosted forums out of curiousity.
ball-park numbers in orders of magnitude is fine.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
I send you big cheers for this! As a DBA, replication, with any RDBMS, has always been a major source of headaches. Being able to do without is a great achievement.
My shop | About Me
I know a couple months ago a client was doing ~400,000 views in an hour by signed-in users (so, not Varnished), against a single database and it did not get near our current capacity limits.
I don't have a handy number for how fast the comments were flying but it's extremely active, and anything I've seen suggests it's the read scaling that hurts way worse than writes on a forum anyway.
Side note: Guest traffic (which hits Varnish cache) is nearly infinitely scalable so it's kinda irrelevant to a discussion about DB load, but obviously we can go light years beyond 400K/hr with guest traffic.