[Typo3] from a lurker :-) about managing communities/forum

[Zach Davis]

Valery Romanchev wrote:

> 
> Chc_forum is not good for large communities. We test it for www.typo3.ru
> It works very slow with 2000+ messages.
> (beacause no caching was implemented in it)

The problem, actually, wasn't necessarily that caching wasn't present -- 
all posts, for example, are cached once they're parsed for formatting 
tags. That's not to say the forum wouldn't benefit from more built-in 
caching; it certainly would, and it's on my to-do list. The problem is 
that it's difficult to take advantage of typo3 caching methods with the 
forum because so much of the content is tailored to the logged in 
frontend user. Of course, I've always felt that the tight integration 
with frontend users and groups is one of the strengths of the forum.

The big problem was that there were two major bottlenecks pertaining to 
how the forum kept track of which posts a user had read that were 
seriously bogging down the forum. I've been profiling the forum code for 
the last month, and I believe that these problems have been resolved. 
I've populated my development copy of the forum with over 6,000 messages 
  and my fe_user table with about 3000 users, and I'm getting page loads 
around 1.3 seconds, sometimes less. Before fixing these problems, the 
forum would take 10-15 seconds to load the front page if there were over 
one or two thousand posts, so we're looking at a speed increase by a 
factor of 10-12. I've rewritten how the forum keeps track of new posts 
in such way that the functionality is essentially the same, but the 
execution time is much much faster, and that seems to making a world of 
difference.

This optimization has been possible because I've recently received 
sponsorship from the Arnd Messer (thank you, Arnd!) to pay me to spend 8 
solid hours on fixing these problems. There is currently a discussion 
taking place on typo3.projects.forum about what features people are 
looking for and how much people are willing to pledge in sponsorship. I 
will soon be releasing a roadmap of planned features and I'll be asking 
people in the community to pitch in what they can sponsor some of the 
most requested features. If you're interested in seeing the continued 
development of the forum, please join in on the discussion on the forum 
newsgroup -- I want to hear from users about what works and what doesn't 
work with the forum. I also want to hear what features you all are most 
interested in seeing implemented.

And, as someone else mentioned, I expect to unofficially release a new 
version of the forum on Sunday or Monday by posting a download link to 
the extension on typo3.projects.forum -- in the past, the participants 
in that newsgroup have been pretty helpful in testing early releases. I 
hope to realease the new version in the TER after about a week of 
testing, sometime around the following Monday. If you'd like to help out 
with the testing, please keep an eye on the forum newsgroup for the 
download link.

Zach