Hello,
I was hoping to get a little insight into wpForo performance with very large forums. In our case we have 6.25+ million posts and 167k members. After years of struggling with bridges, most recently with Xenforo, I'm throwing in the towel on it and looking for an integrated solution. I originally looked at BBPress and discovered that it uses the same WP tables and doesn't isolate queries so after testing saw how it all ground to a halt. They did address it in version 2.6 which has been in beat for over a year, but short of the crew developing it (which carries a lot of weight, IMO), it just seems too basic and too slow moving to be a credible replacement for Xenforo. Anyhow, while researching all of this, I came across wpForo and so far, it seems to have a lot of potential. Granted a built in stand alone forum migrator would be awesome, but I'll bit the bullet on a manual migration of this is indeed the solution I've been looking for.
All this being said, would you mind providing some feedback reagrding what optimization and testing you've done for extremely large forums? We host with WPEngine so decent system resource isn't really an issue, but wondering what I might expect? Basically just fishing to before I dive too deeply and spend countless more hours on yet another system. Any info you might be able to provide that might give me confidence that wpForo can handle our forum or am outside the scope of what this plugin is intended for?
Either way, looks like a great plugin but hoping it might work for us.
Thanks in advance for your time and any advice.
Hi misteraven,
Thank you for your interest in wpForo. The main goal of this forum development is making a opportune to use it for extremely large forums. Here the key features we've added for this purpose:
1. wpForo tables are isolated from WordPress tables and made with indexes to make it as light and fast as possible.
2. wpForo doesn't use WordPress Custom Post types which load lots of objects, functions and hooks. wpForo forums, topics and posts are very light objects with direct connections to each other in the main object.
3. Different forum layouts for different size of forums. The lightest layout is the Simplified layout.
4. wpForo has a built in cache system, makes forum very light and fast, decreases database queries:
- Member cache (prevent collecting member information on second time)
- Memory Cache (smart logic to not allow do the same process twice, it doesn't load the memory, it just keep small info about already collected data and prevent process and data receiving duplication)
- Object cache (caches forum, topic and post objects and keep your database light. Increase database queries dozens of times)
- HTML Cache beta (prevents to generate the same HTML more than one time)
5. Lots of options to enable disable all features to make it maximal light.
However sometimes migrated data may not work fast. The database should be optimized and checked if all data are migrated correctly. For example if the first_post_id is not migrated in topic tables it may decrease wpForo speed dozens of times. And there may be other migration issues which may affect forum speed. So please contact us via support[at]gvectors.com email address once the migration is done. We'll ask you for database access and check if all data is migrated correctly. We can help to make it as fast as possible.
