Size & performance issues (what is the biggest site?)

TomTester

Hi All,

I help run a group with 8000+ members and local chapters in multiple cities across the world (at present about 18, in the future hundreds, haha).

Love Vanilla, the AJAXy interface, the community, the plugins, and above all plugin structure of the code. Moreover the granular rights management and great abstraction of text (language) vs code seems ideal for my purpose, but... how well does it scale up?

Once had a very bad experience with a PERL/SQL database-backed forum (100 concurrent users would take down the server).

Questions:

- What size community is Vanilla designed for?

- What is the biggest known Vanilla site out there?
- How many registered/concurrent users does it have/support?

- How can one optimize the installation in case of extreme traffic?
(caching, text-only, smaller time-outs, remove graphics, disable certain plugins?)

I will post a related issue on "multi-forums with shared user table?" in a minute.

TT

Dinoboff

Vanilla should be used soon by Mozilla, and they will test it or have already test it. I hope they will publish the result. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_Load_Testing

WallPhone

http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/3673/how-scalable-is-vanilla-largest-vanilla-forum/ I would say a Vanilla install lends itself to about 10-50 active discussions a day, basically to the point where threads roll off the first page before a daily surfer would get to them. I am speculating that a niche topic (like PHP) is better than a broad topic (web programming) as the categories in the broad topic would be very numerous and the diverse topics would clutter the discussions page. But Vanilla has a block category option that would clean this up for the regular users, so this may be a moot point. I have been toying with the idea for a static cache that extends the friendly URLs extension. Have already done something similar for one of my other sites. This article will give you the general idea: http://www.krunch.be/vrac/txt/fast_caching_with_mod_rewrite.html It would work best in the case of a slashdot effect, where most users would be passive. One optimization could be to move the if statements in extensions out of them and into the extensions.php file (or some sort of meta extension), that way the extension is only included (loaded into memory and parsed) if those conditions are met. Many conditions are also similar (i.e., if user is signed on, then include these extensions, else include these) so this could remove redundant comparisions. (at a high maintence trade off) Vanilla also has built-in support for database farms, to reduce that potential bottleneck.

TomTester

Read that earlier, hence I was a little puzzled with Mark's previous comments on the
speed/size topic (pertained to 0.92). Somehow I managed to lose the link to that
discussion, but in it he suggested that large communities used to vBulletin etc. might
not like Vanilla...

I'd be very interested in a 'high traffic' mode or plugin.

Awaiting more answers before diving into the code, but I know from experience that
caching queries (even for 5-30 seconds) can have a dramatic effect on server use
without really impacting the user-experience.

Anyone know if search queries are cached at present (those seem rather 'expensive').
In the past I disabled full-text search on very busy forums (or limited to titles only).