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Vanilla vs. FluxBB vs. MyBB siege test
I've just installed all three tests on a Prometeus VZSSD5 (2 core, 512 MB ram, SSD) to find out what is the performance of each forum. I'm using a standard Minstall setup, what means nginx + php-fpm + apc + mysql no-innodb.
Here are the findings (all of them stock configuration).
The command I used was siege -c100 -t 5s forum.example.com
Vanilla (github/stable)
-c100
Transactions: 122 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 4.62 secs
Data transferred: 0.25 MB
Response time: 1.94 secs
Transaction rate: 26.41 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.05 MB/sec
Concurrency: 51.26
Successful transactions: 122
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 3.53
Shortest transaction: 0.13
-c200
Transactions: 120 hits
Availability: 27.84 %
Elapsed time: 4.20 secs
Data transferred: 0.30 MB
Response time: 2.03 secs
Transaction rate: 28.57 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.07 MB/sec
Concurrency: 57.94
Successful transactions: 120
Failed transactions: 311
Longest transaction: 3.27
Shortest transaction: 0.01
MyBB
-c100
Transactions: 649 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 4.93 secs
Data transferred: 1.94 MB
Response time: 0.25 secs
Transaction rate: 131.64 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.39 MB/sec
Concurrency: 32.59
Successful transactions: 649
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 0.40
Shortest transaction: 0.03
-c200
Transactions: 673 hits
Availability: 96.70 %
Elapsed time: 4.79 secs
Data transferred: 2.01 MB
Response time: 0.73 secs
Transaction rate: 140.50 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.42 MB/sec
Concurrency: 103.14
Successful transactions: 673
Failed transactions: 23
Longest transaction: 1.00
Shortest transaction: 0.01
FluxBB
-c100
Transactions: 937 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 4.85 secs
Data transferred: 1.41 MB
Response time: 0.04 secs
Transaction rate: 193.20 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.29 MB/sec
Concurrency: 8.09
Successful transactions: 937
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 0.14
Shortest transaction: 0.01
-c200
Transactions: 1576 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 4.94 secs
Data transferred: 2.37 MB
Response time: 0.08 secs
Transaction rate: 319.03 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.48 MB/sec
Concurrency: 25.23
Successful transactions: 1576
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 0.26
Shortest transaction: 0.01
So the result is that no matter how much I'd like to use Vanilla, FluxBB has 10x the performance of Vanilla, under heavy load.
What surprises me is that how is is possible that this site uses Vanilla? Did you implement some crazy nginx microcache or Varnish solution? How do you know what pages should be cached and what should be rendered?
Comments
This site is not being run on anything close to 'low end', or a VPS
But I heard it all started on a 64MB/96MB box or something similar. Wasn't it a forum at that time?
We're talking large dedicateds zsero
Hell, when I registered for vanilla it was like 1GB ram VMware @ ENS
It's when this forum started
Now it's on bigger box
OK, I get it :-) It's just strange that Vanilla is frequently recommended here for LEB forums, that's how I found it too. So in my opinion I'd only recommend it for small communities. It's a pity, since I really love the interface compared to almost any other forum software.
LET wasn't running Vanilla when LEB started, I can't remember what it was, OSQA?
LETv2 was OSQA
LETv1 was bbPress
i love vanilla also.
would love to build a community so i could implement it
Configuration on nginx is a b**ch, but this blog post helped a lot. http://blog.bigdinosaur.org/vanilla-forum-on-nginx/ Still it's broken in a few functions, and the github has 200+ open tickets, so I don't know if they're ever gonna fix it. MyBB and FluxBB worked out of the box.
fluxbb is sexy as hell.
FluxBB is insanely underestimated, it's insane. The funny thing is, It can be tuned so much more to even have a greater effect. I don't even believe the css is minified. (I don't think they use sprites either). You can also delete the update_online/?check_user function that grabs the online table every refresh to delete "inactive" users. And just setup a cron to run that instead, which would save 1 query for each page, each refresh. And the update_forum function they have when making a post/topic could just be changed to num_replies=num_replies+1, instead of counting all the posts and then adding +1 to it. There is tons of more sneaky performance things you can do to make it even faster. Also I believe the latest version is only using sha1 encryption, moving to crypt with a individual seed for each user would be the best.
Thanks for your results. Now If you got time, can you do these with shitty Vbulletin / IPB / Burning Board? Just for shit's and giggles? I am a minimalist kind of guy and I hate bloated forum systems. I actually believe the fastest vbulletin forum I've seen is offtopic.com. Or it might just be because they have 6+dedicated servers? I'll never know.
edit: I'll post this in the fluxbb forum as well, the developers will wet their pants. (I'll link it here )
They already know, and are quite proud :P There's a ton of these type of benchmarks all over their forums. You can even find the ones comparing Flux to vB and IPB, it's funny. I did my own testing on Flux vs XenForo and IPB, CPU/memory usage was like 75% lower while req/s were 50%+ higher. It's no doubt it's a very, very light forum system. They don't even have a user PM system built-in right? (I know there's a mod for one though).
OK, here is one more thing I didn't realise yesterday. The response times. The difference there is even bigger!
Vanilla response -c200: 2.03 secs
MyBB response -c100: 0.25 secs
MyBB response -c200: 0.73 secs
FluxBB response -c100: 0.04 secs
FluxBB response -c200: 0.08 secs
Also to note the biggest problem with fluxbb is that it converts users text to bbcode and stores it as bbcode format. (NOT HTML). This is a stupid idea for large boards. Every refresh you're putting tons of work on php by having to re-format each post into the proper format (HTML). Which is stupid, why not just format the user(s) text to HTML and store it as HTML so you can let the browser do the work? That's just another way to increase performance on it, but you would have to re-write the parser.... but you can google php bbcode parser functions. Also I believe PECL has a PHP BBCODE function built right in! You would only need to parse the text when submitting it into the database (into HTML). Then never have to touch it again.
FluxBB's way is: Parse Text into BBCODE -> INSERT into database, then re-parse it again each time for each post, per refresh, once every topic. It just doesn't make sense. But I guess this would only be beneficial for large boards.
Pretty large 4.6million posts board @ http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/ Which is on Flux, to bad it's in french haha.
@Nexus - Injection, injection, injection. Saving html to the database just begs for code injection. Second all code parts should be saved such as plain text with things like
so that there is no possibility of execustionI think http://htmlpurifier.org/ would take care of it, but then maybe they find a bug in htmlpurifier and then they'd need to re-purify all the already saved posts. But still, if I were to make a forum now, I'd save purified html directly and maybe make a job to re-purify the database on each new HTMLPurifier release.
@zsero Yeah, was trying to inform @Nexus.
I still don't believe that there is not a whole in html purifier.
@Nexus most boards use bbcode as it is safer than html as you can control with commands are used, and it is a fairly developed implementation.
is it right well? I guess it is personal preference. It is more secure than html, but less secure than plain text.
I'm more impressed with how well MyBB held up. I've always been a fan on MyBB but I always thought of it as a "heavier" software similar to IPB and vB.
I wonder how many people can say they like Vanilla Forum?
My first impression was that it was kinda sparse when I first started using it especially when comparing the features to vbulletin, I like how you can add rep to a user, not sure if vanilla has this plugin?
After using vanilla on LET I've somewhat grown fond of it and actually prefer the simplicity over other Forums, but reading some reviews I see a lot of negative comments they go as far to say they won't sign up to the forum because it's using Vanilla..
So what do you guys think? do you prefer the traditional layout of a typical forum like mybb or do you prefer Vanilla with it's "discussion view" layout
I remember posting on LET when it was still running bbPress. Pretty light activity back then.
I started using FluxBB about a month ago, it just tanks anything that gets thrown at it, never seem anything load so fast and I have it running on 64mb.
Yup.. it was pretty lonely back in the day, and to be honest I did not like the layout of bbpress..
I wonder if using vanilla contributed to the popularity of this forum, just cause it's simpleto use.
It's worth a shot.. I do like the look and how snappy it feels but was thinking maybe mybb was better cause it's more mature, probably has a bigger following?
At present LET seems to be using premium CloudFlare service.
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/lowendtalk.com
Is anything about lowend talk/box actually low end?
Not anymore. The lowendwiki used to run on lowend hardware, but not anymore.
That is strange. Wondering whether it is due to higher capacity requirements or something else..?
But sqlite support sucks.
File: include/dblayer/sqlite.php
Guess they never heard of PDO.
+1 @sleddog.
I really like Vanilla! but so far it seems everyone I ask likes the default layout of a typical forum with it's heading and subheading.
Might end up just using Mybb.. I like how snappy fluxbb feels but not sure about community support and the availability of plugin.
OP, would you mind adding phpbb to the table?
I'm really curious about it.