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Should forums.gentoo.org move to a commercial forums package?
Yes -- keeping older posts searchable is more important than sticking with GPL-only products
53%
 53%  [ 84 ]
No -- lose some of the older posts and stay on the GPL'd phpBB
46%
 46%  [ 73 ]
Total Votes : 157

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Techie2000
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 7:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From what I understand, the issue is mostly due to the strain on the server when people search. Right?

Here is my idea for a temporary solution. Turn off the search feature on the forums, and let the Google spider bots descend upon and index the forum if they haven't already. Then Google has an option where you can set it up to just search your site from a search box you put there using Google.

Not sure how effective or useful it would be, but just an idea to throw out there. As far as changing board softwrare goes, I personally feel that the archived data is much more important than anything else, and that if it is in fact necessary to change to a commercial software package in order to continue to effectively run the forums, and the phpBB people have not indicated that 2.2.x will be released anytime soon, and that there is no possible way to fix this otherwise, than the social contract should be modified, and the forums changed over to a commercial system such as vBulletin.
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klieber
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 8:34 pm    Post subject: Re: Can anyone summarize why phpBB has poor performance? Reply with quote

wisecounselor wrote:
For those of us learning development skills, can any summarize why phpBB has a performance problem, I would like to know so that I don't make similar mistakes.

It's inaccurate to say that phpBB has a performance problem. phpBB has served us extremely well through 30k user registrations and half a million posts. It's only in the last few weeks where we've started to notice scalability problems. We've been able to mitigate most of those through various tweaks and hacks suggested by other users in various forums.

--kurt
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eromb
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

IMHO the gentoo-forums are slow, because so many (unnecessary?) modifications have been made through the years. phpbb.com's Forum is much bigger and they don't have issues at all with their unmodded forum. The theme is not such an issue, but you were complaining about "the uneffective way phpbb handles SQL queries". Maybe that's because you changed something there? I'd go with a clean 2.0.6 adjust the theme and that's it. Everything apart from that, that's not absolutely necessary should be dropped, at least for the time being.

Btw: Why is the code to our forum not opensource? I think that'd help a lot. Anybody could contribute. Wouldn't that be in sense of the Social Contract? Show us that mess (or that it isn't).

Btw2: Just wanted to remember the end of the Social Contract: "We will not hide problems". Ok, good work so far klieber, let's keep it that way...

Cheers

:!: All opinions are personal and might even be wrong :!:
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Joe
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 1:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

eromb wrote:

Btw: Why is the code to our forum not opensource? I think that'd help a lot. Anybody could contribute. Wouldn't that be in sense of the Social Contract? Show us that mess (or that it isn't).

Btw2: Just wanted to remember the end of the Social Contract: "We will not hide problems". Ok, good work so far klieber, let's keep it that way...


Now you will feel the "security by obscurity" - mace...

Btw3: There are some posts in the phpBB.com Forum by the LeadDeveloper of phpBB and KLieber discussing that issue.

Regars,

Joe





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aent
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 9:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to point something out, in this topic, people recommended switching to Oracle... I realize that it was already said that it was not going to happen, but I am just raising the point to make another point... Oracle most likely would be better suited for the job, even if it is closed source, commerical software and would run better...

I think we should just get the solution which will perform the best, and personally, I use Invision Power Board on my site/forums. I find it much easier to administrate, much faster, much more flexible, more feature rich, faster, and so on... its simpily better, just like Oracle is simpily faster then mySQL for large databases... I don't think we should have the attitude that "we should use this over that because this is open source and that just has the source available and is free" but rather we should just try to get the best solution for this forum... since we can't switch database engines to a faster one, I think we should switch forum engines to a faster and better one, and its not going to cost us anything as the phpBB2 message convertor does work well...

phpBB tends to be slower from what I have seen for a couple of reasons:
1) Queries have not been heavily optimized for mySQL like they have been in IPB and the database drivers are not the most efficient to say the least
2) The posts in the database are stored with the BB Code form, that means they must be parsed each and every time a post is viewed anywhere, whereas IPB stores the code as HTML in the database and converts it back to BB Code upon editing/quoting/so on the topic... this is much more efficient since a post is generally viewed a lot more times then it is edited or quoted or whatever. Why doesn't phpBB do this then? They have the custom BB codes feature, which makes it impossible to do this accurately and reliablely. In order to add custom BB codes in IPB, you need to modify the post_parser.php file, but at least that way you gain a LOT of speed. I am very familiar with the source of phpBB and IPB, I have literally read every line of both...

Freeware (ok, fine, software that has a $0 price tag) is not necessarily bad, and I think IPB is better suited for the job, and its not like IPB is anti-open source or GPL or anything (they released the tar.php file under the GPL for example which is included with IPB)... Plus, they are very flexible on there license anyways (they are allowing me to redistribute IPB files modified to work with postgreSQL on a 3rd party site for example), I don't see what the big deal is about using non-GPL software if its simpily better, especially if it doesn't cost anything...

We have non-GPL software, and software which has price tags on it in portage such as VMware, but does that mean VMware is bad? Also look at the games section! A LOT of those are not open source or released under the GPL... I think we should just switch to IPB, its simpily better suited for the job, and why try to hide we are using closed source software by switching to something like oracle, where we will have to pay a ton of money?

EDIT: I want to add one more thing though that I forgot to mention before:
Pruning the posts or separating them from the main system is the absolute WORST thing you can do for Gentoo. I have found useful information using the search system which has more often then not been more then 6 months old, and most people aren't willing to use the search system at all to search for there problems, especially n00bs... if we have two separate forums, one as an archive, it creates the issue of instead of having to go to one board to search, we now would have to go to two boards to work, more work means less people will do it... also if we have something to contribute to an old topic, we will be unable to do so... I would have had to ask many more questions then the few I have had to ask here if it weren't for some of the really old topics... why sacrifice that information or make it harder to access just to say "we are using open source software"?
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logon
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

imho switching to a non open source forum software is the worst we can do, cause it simply is a kick in the stomage of the oss idea. If a software doesnt suite your needs perfectly, improve it till it fits for you. And as far as i know there is a newer version of phpBB then 2.0.4, so why not first upgrade and see if it helps?
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klieber
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

logon wrote:
And as far as i know there is a newer version of phpBB then 2.0.4, so why not first upgrade and see if it helps?

Because nobody has stepped up to the plate to do so.

--kurt
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 3:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

why is the theme so much important? excuse me but i dont give a **** what this board looks like if it works. I don't know how much you changed and i am not more then what you called the everage php coder. But functionality should go over beauty.
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mmealman
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 6:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

klieber wrote:
logon wrote:
And as far as i know there is a newer version of phpBB then 2.0.4, so why not first upgrade and see if it helps?

Because nobody has stepped up to the plate to do so.


Just pop the mods you want with the needed extras(images and what not for the theme) in a seperate thread and let anyone who wants to to hack on it.

It's hard to get programmers to commit to an undefined amount of work. On the other hand, if you just put the stuff out there you'll get about 20 opinions on the "right" way to do it, with a couple guys actually churning out code to prove that their way really is the better way.
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eLiTeGuRu
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 10:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why not just archive the old posts. There is an archive tool for phpBB here: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=95053
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klieber
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 9:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

We're now upgraded to 2.0.6. Big thanks to rac for stepping in and handling the patching effort.

--kurt
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swimmer
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 9:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

klieber wrote:
We're now upgraded to 2.0.6. Big thanks to rac for stepping in and handling the patching effort.

--kurt


Juppiee!!!

Congratulations to the team who made this possible!

I hope the scalability is back now :)

Greetz
Stefan
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 11:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry to ask the obvious but has the upgrade helped at all judging from performance after the upgrade? I've no doubt we'll still be anxiously awaiting the release of phpBB 2.2.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 5:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

klieber wrote:
We're now upgraded to 2.0.6. Big thanks to rac for stepping in and handling the patching effort.

--kurt
Kudos rac!! Thanks a ton!
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 20, 2003 5:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

great!
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mrniceguy
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 7:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How about moving all of the older posts to another, offline, database for the time being? Then when phpBB reaches 2.2 (hopefully) the scalability problems will have gone and the forums can be upgraded and the removed posts added back in again.

Wouldn't that be a solution to the problem, assuming that the loss of older posts is acceptable for an amount of time (weeks, months)?
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 26, 2003 3:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, considering the fora is now running current phpBB2.0.x and that fact it's not been converted to anything else... I'd say whatever problems that were affecting here aren't doing so anymore. :)
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 3:45 pm    Post subject: Where are we? Reply with quote

Yeah, the forums are now on version 2.0.6.

Now my questions:

Did/Has this fixed all the issues we were having before?
Are there still problems/issues?
If there are problems/issues are we operating on the assumption that we can limp along until the next phpBB release?
I guess what I am saying is... where are we?
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hurray for RAC!!!

Has this thing helped on the performance?
/me crosses fingers
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dimopoulos
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2003 11:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

<0.02>
Personally I like any kind of forum software that is fast and allows me to work as efficiently as possible. The search engine is one of the main things that one should look into when looking for a forum software as well as performance.

Putting aside the relationship that has to (?) exist between free Gentoo and free forum software, I would vote for UBB.Threads by Infopop (www.infopop.com). I personally believe that it is one of - if not - the best forum software around in the market. Yes it is commercial and yes it does cost but I am sure that the cost would be small against the benefit achieved - and I am not talking about making the board look beautiful.

I am using the abovementioned software in 7 different websites, the biggest one comparing to Gentoo's with constant 150 users online and so far more than 200K posts (it has been operational for a year). I have other aquaintances that have reached 1,000,000 posts in their boards and all works well. Additionally there is a community of people that optimize more and enhance the software with more features. As far as hardware is concerned the requirements aren't that great, so long as you have a fine tuned installation of MySQL and decent RAM.

Moving the old posts is essential in my view. Even Joe Bloggs who posts once a year (like me :D ) can contribute something that will be useful to someone else. I know that there are people that have converted phpBB to UBB.Threads successfully with no loss of data. If the admins are interested in exploring this option feel free to give me a shout and I will forward you information.

</0.02>

Nikos
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captnjameskirk
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 2:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sekh wrote:

Has this thing helped on the performance?


Nope.

I don't know about anyone, but it now actually seems worse to me. Even submitting a post takes forever after you click the submit button.

Kind of ironic for gentoo, which prides itself on being a "compile to optimize" distro.
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How do i vote :oops:
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 9:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

wryoung98 wrote:
How do i vote :oops:

voting is closed, as is this topic. For now, we're sticking with phpBB.

--kurt
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