Hello,

Can anyone tell me how well the BuddyPress forums will scale? I see you can tie them into a bbPress install, which I’ve done and is working, but if the BuddyPress forums are considered robust enough, what’s the point of setting up and maintaining a separate bbPress installation? For a simple forum (albeit one that might grow large), is BuddyPress good enough?

Specifically, I want to create a forum for support on my BuddyPress site. I think that creating a Group called ‘Support’ and using the Group forum, might be enough. What do others think?

[@fishbowl81 Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

I don’t believe their is such a thing as “buddypress forums”, I believe buddypress requires bbpress for it’s forum capabilities.

WordPress MU will scale without question beyond the needs of any individual providing enough server backend power.

BBpress as a stand alone should be able to scale large enough for most people. Due to a the different nature of forum database structure, it isn’t as easy to breakup among many servers as a the mu blogs are. An active forum can easily have 100k’s of posts, and I’m not aware of a way to archive older posts into backup tables. BBpress uses 1 table for all posts, it would be possible (there might even already be a plugin to do this) to move each forum to a seperate table, and therefor possibly a separate server.

My concern would be for the XML-RPC mechanism used to talk to the forums. This was designed, with good caching, but on a very large buddypress install with 100’s of active groups and 10000’s of members I wonder how much overhead the xml-rpc adds compared to a straight database lookup. It does allow for the bbpress to be moved to a secondary server, which is good, and is safe as it stores a bbpress creditials and not database creditals if the admin account happened to get compromised. The nice part is, the it was written with the bbpress_live class, which could be replaced with any other class. So someone could, if so desired actually rewrite the class to talk to a vbulletin forum or other solution. It could even do direct database lookups and inserts if desired. I’m sure we will see this in the near future, as some large vbulletin sites may want to add the social abilities of buddypress, and maintain their forums, as buddypress groups.

I have only used BBpress inside of Buddypress, so I haven’t yet had to deal with scaling issues, as I beleive mine has about 45 posts total.

Any Thoughts?

Brad

http://gorgeousgamers.com/beta/

[@josswinn Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

BuddyPress does have forums (you’re using them on your site . It’s one of the standard set of plugins, called bp-forums. Accessible when you create a Group. I’d like to create a ‘Support’ Group where people are directed to for user-to-user support. I could use bbPress, but it seems like it’s adding yet another application to manage.

If the BP group forums are intended to scale well, it seems easier for my needs to run the BP group forums rather than bbPress.

[@josswinn Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

I now see where you’re coming from. The BuddyPress Forum settings state:

“To enable forums for each group in a BuddyPress installation, you must first download, install, and setup bbPress and integrate it with WordPress MU.

Once you have bbPress set up correctly, enter the options below so that BuddyPress can connect.”

Well, I’ve turned the integration off but can still post. I need to look at this some more.