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Vanilla speed

anime4christanime4christ
edited August 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Somebody said Vanilla is slower than other forum systems like PunBB (which I currently use). My question is, has anybody done a real speed test on them, and what would be a good way to test the speed anyways?
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Comments

  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Mark (the developer) recons it's probably slower than punBB. I'm not sure what his reasons for that claim are. Then again it's probably faster than many other systems such as phpBB. It's certainly not a 'slow' forum.
    There was an extension which timed each page load but i tihnk it's got lost with the v1 upgrade. I'm guessing something like that would be a pretty reasonable comparison. I think there are more technical ways involving some more complex server stuff but I'm not sure.

    Unless you're running a mega huge mega active forum, dont let speed be the thing that puts you off.
  • anime4christanime4christ
    edited August 2006
    Thanks, yeah, speed isn't much of an issue. The only thing I've noticed so far is when it does those sliding and fading animations, it tends to slow down a bit. After all, no javascript is faster, but having javascript makes it a bit cooler, IMO. 2 more questions, not related to speed: Why don't we have access keys? (I like em) Why doesn't it pass XHTML validation on thread pages? (I sometimes break my pages for the sake of functionality, but I still had to ask the question. ^^;)
  • orangeorange
    I haven't seen any comparision. Since that's PunBB's primary goal, I would be very surprised if it wasn't faster than Vanilla -- AFAIK, Vanilla's primary goal isn't to be speedy. From my personal experience, Vanilla's speed is more than enough. Who wants a girl that runs fast when you can have the sexy one?
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    edited August 2006
    Re: Access keys,
    You may want to check out Quick keys.
  • anime4christanime4christ
    Quote:
    Who wants a girl that runs fast when you can have the sexy one?

    hehe, kind of a bad comparision for someone with a sign in name like mine, eh? Personally, I don't think I should waste my time chasing girls yet, I'm only 17.

    BTW, is there an easier way to do a quote?
  • anime4christanime4christ
    Cool, thx WallPhone. ^_^
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Vanilla should pass validation on all pages as far as i'm aware. Mark and a team put a whole ton of work into re-writing the entire front end pretty much for the release of v1 so it was completely valid and whatnot. I think the only thing that might stop it being valid is if someone's written a discussion name with something in which makes the page invalid. Try validating a page with no discussions on? Or let us know what's invalidating it.
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    The add-ons site has a useful search.
  • anime4christanime4christ
    edited August 2006
    Well, how about this thread for example?
  • orangeorange
    Sorry for that anime4christ, it's 04:37 AM here and I should try to do what everyone else does at that time. Didn't mean to offend anyone. :) About the validation. I started to write my own theme and hooked in my own application framework, which by default serves pages as xml for browsers that supports it. As soon as someone uses eg. & and other xml entities, the files aren't longer displayed at all in firefox. I haven't bother to look into it since there would be lots of places where you need to convert text to entities (and maybe add some overhead). I didn't intend to use that function anyway.
  • anime4christanime4christ
    It's all right, I didn't get offended, I'm just saying it doesn't fit all too well with me. Then again, there are plenty of Christians who don't agree with my view, they'll just go after any hot girl or whatever without thinking it through and praying first. I'm just a bit more old-fashioned I guess.

    Well, I guess what would need to be fixed is the way forms are in the markup.
  • BergamotBergamot
    I think whispers in particular slow it down a bit by preventing user-to-user caching.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Mostly it will be slower because it is written with PHP classes which are parsed slower than straight PHP spagetti code that most other PHP boards are written in. It's a trade-off. The classes allow Vanilla to be way more extensible, but slow it down at the same time.

    Regardless, it takes a lot of discussions, a highly active user base, and a slow server for you to really notice a speed drop in Vanilla.
  • anime4christanime4christ
    OK, so far, I'm really liking Vanilla, I'm going to ask my members if they think I should switch to Vanilla or stay with PunBB. And I'm thinking about building another forum, if I will, most likely I'll use Vanilla for it. I like both, PunBB is the best traditional forum in my opinion, and I really like the freshness of Vanilla. Is there a good PunBB to Vanilla migration tool?
  • ToivoToivo New
    ... search :)
  • anime4christanime4christ
    Then again, PunBB is pretty deeply interated into my website, so I might not be able to migrate my main forum to Vanilla.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    It all depends. Vanilla can be integrated into just about anything, but if you've already set up to use pun's authentication files, then you'd have to undo some of that work before you could integrate with Vanilla's. Alternately you could just make vanilla use whatever authentication files you're already using.
  • Max_BMax_B New
    Mark wrote
    Mostly it will be slower because it is written with PHP classes which are parsed slower than straight PHP spagetti code that most other PHP boards are written in. It's a trade-off. The classes allow Vanilla to be way more extensible, but slow it down at the same time.
    And the code is, sometime, a bit over-structured, IMO. SqlBuilder class is an exemple.
    No offense Mark, Vanilla is a jewell, as I already wrote on Vanilla Dev. Classy code is fun, just a bit slower. Hope it'll not be a problem for me either.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Yeah, sql builder is retarded. It was one of the first things I tried with Vanilla and, of course, Vanilla is now using it everywhere.

    I kind of want to change it to use a dictionary of queries similar to the language dictionary. That way you'd just write a different set of queries for every different type of database.

    But the problem arises that a lot of these queries are built on-the-fly with different options - something that you really need to be able to do. So I've left it like this until I can think of something better.
  • Max_BMax_B New
    edited August 2006
    But the problem arises that a lot of these queries are built on-the-fly with different options - something that you really need to be able to do. So I've left it like this until I can think of something better.
    My suggestion would be to keep its overall structure -AddSelect, AddWhere, etc.- and cut down the arguments number and predefinition to just have a relevant string passed. Sure you need to check the string bit with care, but this is much easier to add special case, like the fulltext syntax we discussed once, when needed.

    Edit: … and, StartWhereGroup as a side effect argument was a nightmare for me to figure out, while EndWhereGroup is always a method call.
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