vBulletin vs. phpbb

[thewitt]

I'm just sharing my observations after looking at most (all?) of the forums online that I could find. I used them by joining as many as I could, and then made the choice about what I'd put on my sites.

I am a programmer (20+ years worth), however I am not interested in programming everything on my websites.

I also run a niche site that will never have high volume, however my users are also not computer literate, and so I needed something easy to use.

vB met my needs, with a few minor exceptions that I hope will be addressed in v2.1.

It looks like phpBB 2 will be getting some nice features in the future that will make it even more attractive.

-t

[DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR]

the [H]ard|Forum has just about killed vB (600-800+ users on at peak time, 1.7 million posts). actually i guess it's MySQL's fault -- but it sure is down a lot.

[MattR]

Originally posted by DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR
the [H]ard|Forum has just about killed vB (600-800+ users on at peak time, 1.7 million posts). actually i guess it's MySQL's fault -- but it sure is down a lot.

We managed 1040 on baseball trade day -- Sybase was slow but managed to stay afloat.

[iFroggy]

DarkMonkey,

You make a good point. I am glad that you are a user at my site.

As you eluded to, I just don't have the money for a vBulletin.

MattR,

The best product out there is vBulletin. Your site is so high traffic and you are probably in a different situation where you can afford the best, which is great.

I believe that phpBB can handle it, or at least something similar, as I said I have asked some people and will get back to you with the most active of phpBBs.

thewitt,

Yeah I understand that... why reinvent the wheel, right?

[theFinn]

Although I disagree with Patrick that 1) anyone at the phpBB support forums is out and out rude to uses and 2) vBulletin is worth the money. I do agree with him that phpBB (v1.4.2 especally) could more then handle the load of 500 or so concurrent users.

For example, someone decided to attack the phpBB2 forums the other day. At the hight of it we have over 300 sessions in the database and the main index page was not noticably slower.

With MySQL tweeked right phpBB could stand shoulder to shoulder with vB when it comes to handling traffic. We've done stress tests on phpBB v2.0 and it fairs quite well, plus with the ability to use other DBMS's we can take advantage of the better scaliablity of MS-SQL and PostgreSQL (Something vB STILL hasn't done)

On the subject of most active phpBB forums, I think the Exciter Foren (A German Depeche Mode forum) is probably the biggest. Currently just under 170,000 posts and they general have from 50 - 200 concurrent users. Every time I've visisted the site has been nice and quick (sub 1 second page gen times). Here's a link: http://www.depeche-forum.de/phpBB/

[certify]

What about infopop newest addition of wwwthreads (now renamed to UBBthreads)?

[Defender1]

eww... flatfiles.
you wanna benchmark how long it'll take ubb to run with 500 concurrent users and over a million posts?
Not to mention the diskspace.

[theFinn]

Originally posted by Defender1
eww... flatfiles.
you wanna benchmark how long it'll take ubb to run with 500 concurrent users and over a million posts?
Not to mention the diskspace.

Actually, as long as noone is posting or searching it should be very fast because its all static content. UBB 6.1 is much improved over the older versions, they've even got a nice PHP cache wrapper. But its still going to be a resource hog on things like search and posting

WWW/UBBthreads however has a database backend so, if its coded well, it should be just as good as vB and phpBB resource wise.

[Defender1]

that's what i meant about the concurrent users.
just imagine if at least half of them posted around the same time?