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Best LEB-friendly forum software?
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
What is the best LEB-friendly forum software?
MyBB? phpBB? SMF? Or is there some micro-forum software optimized for low-mem?
Something with an option to use sqlite would be extra awesome, though I'm aware write contention on sqlite is pretty hideous.
Comments
Depends how many features you want. FluxBB is super light. I benchmarked it as well as IPB and XenForo with apachebench and Flux would finish 3x faster than the other two (on threads and main page)
I ran phpBB on a 128/256 VPS, wasn't very traffic heavy though.
My MyBB setup use only 55 MB memory with php5-fpm, percona and nginx.
I'm running 2 MyBB forums on LEB too They are working great :P Memory is less than 128MB on both boxes
i'll have to say mybb like the rest as well. I have had bad experience with SMF, especially the spam bug.
+1 for FluxBB although I do love using VanillaForums.
Many of the "non-MySQL" php forums aren't written too well.
I have a myBB forum that receives way to many junk signup's. Ran a flux in the past with the same issue. Overall though, FluxBB is probably the least memory intensive that you could run comfortably that compares to the options listed above.
I've had experience with SMF forums large and small. SMF 2 has made great performance leaps over SMF 1. During when I was moving a few sites around I setup a temporary SMF board on one of my LEBs, it was pretty fast.
There are a number of things you can do to help speed it up from a default install, if you choose that option
@Roph OMG! Excelent post, thanks for the info (SMF user here) I will consider this if my forum gets slow some day...
There are mods to install reCAPTCHA, works great and will solve the problem.
Didn't work on my forums Spammers can by pass or manual enter the captcha
UseBB is very lightweight, but doesn't have all the features of the other boards mentioned here.
Time for CloudFlare.
(Oh just a side chat,haven't see you at GTalk quite a while. :P)
PunBB is one I really like and suggest for something lightweight. Though, FWIW, I have only personally used it and PhpBB. I settled on PunBB when I used it because it was the most and easily extensible and customizable but also extremely lightweight given the functionality.
FluxBB is light but I just didn't like it, I used to run a fairly high traffic MyBB forum on 512mb although I'm sure it could have run on 256 or smaller.
FluxBB is the shit guys. It's easy to modify too.
@Infinity link?
RamHost uses fluxxBB for their site's forum: https://forum.ramhost.us/bbs/
FluxBB: Arch Linux Forum
@onetwo I like the bbs in their links, makes me want to go back to the real telnet style bulletin board systems...
Vanilla Forums can run on a 128mb. Don't use CentOS and Apache, though.
I'm interested to know how the proper way of doing a benchmark for forum scripts, I will gladly do this on my shiny BlueVM KVM
actually I think you could look how many database queries it makes. you can remove stuff to do it make less.
MyBB has worked great for me on 128-256mb (Xen or KVM) VPSs.
You need some spam protection plugin:
Best way, install all the forums on the same server, then hit them with apachebench (from another machine). See what uses the least memory/cpu and maximizes requests/second. (test multiple pages; main page, forum thread, index, etc).
If you could fill the database up and then do this, it'd be even better, but too much work imo.
I came across this the other day. It's nice.
https://github.com/courtenay/altered_beast
Another +1 for FluxBB!
@jtodd Ruby is not friendly for LEBs
How low end are you talking? I imagine it's a lot more efficient that phpBB for example, and it's actually a really nice script too.
If it's a small forum what about MyBB and sqlite? As long as the writes are not all that often sqlite can work pretty well.