Does anyone other then vBulletin staff think vBulletin is fast?

I guess the only staff I can think of is @Mark.B
I've seen him praise his vb5 setup and has been for months.

On a side note, I do see the "new threads" link on vb.com is actually fast now, almost what I would consider very fast.

 

I havent actually tried it since 505.
AFAIK, no work was specifically done on it, but I guess it benefited from some general performance updates.

Overall, vB5 is a lot faster than it was, but on large sites I dont think anyone would describe it as being fast.

 

Well I didn't give up on the new threads search the two times I tested it today, that's a move in the right direction.

 

Funny I come across this thread.. a co-worker was asking me about forums, software, etc and I was going to vB's website. Oddly enough I couldn't get the homepage to work the first time, about 10 secs later and a couple of page retries we made it .

 

I don't recall ever saying vB5 was fast.

I did say it worked well enough on my demo site, but I acknowledged that the site was empty.

I've since been running the RSS poster robot to gradually bolster up the number of posts on the demo site, to give some small element of slight realism to that, but even with that I think it's only got a couple of thousand.

Performance remains a key focus, as can be seen the upcoming 5.0.5 has many performance improvements.

 

I am not going past vB 4.x. The official forum seems to be pretty slow.

 

The answer to your question Brandon is, no, for me. I don't thinks vB5 is fast. It is also not fast enough.

Whereas, the bigger issue is, vB5 was released as "not-beta" and was terribly, terribly slow. The real damage has already been done. I say that because, now a good number of customers are sensitive to ANY "slowness". In other words, anything considered close to slow, even if it isn't really slow, will be held against vBulletin now.

As I was learning about software quality assurance, the lecturer said that performance should be considered as a feature and should also be worked on with the same sort of consideration and process. Maybe I misunderstood him, but I think that is wrong, especially, if poor performance deters from a good user experience. Performance is measurable, so it should be standardized to meet customer expectations. If those standards aren't met, the product isn't fit for consumption. Maybe he meant, meet the standards and then iterate on getting better performance, where it makes sense. Then I guess I would agree with him on that.

At any rate, I think everybody will agree, with a web interface, good performance or the perception of good performance is actually very critical for user acceptance of the interface. Since that statement is common fact, an online software like vBulletin must meet certain performance standards (those, which are acceptable for most customers), before it can be released as a gold product. This is where vB5 failed and is still failing. This situation has even caused certain former vB.com staff to say things like, "vB5 is only good for small starting sites". What kind of crap is that? *Kaboom, Shot self in foot, again.*

When will vB5 be ready for big active sites?

Now the vB team have to meet even higher standards with regards to performance, before a good number of (vocal) customers will accept vB5 as "performing well" and give it a thumbs up. You know, the ones who will also be glad to stay vocal and talk good about it, if vBulletin is ever really good again.

Oh btw, taking vB5 back to beta would most likely "reset" those close minded customer perspectives on vB5's performance..

Scott

 

Yes, you are right @Brandon, I do find vbulletin based forums to be very slow. I find MyBB to be much faster than vbulletin. I heard that vbulletin is developing a new interface and so would increase its speed. I hope that this time, it will be upgrading and bring good performance along with its new look and degisn.

 

Speed depends on quite a few factors.

 

True but a lot can be gained by optimizing the script it self, every optimysation should be used php, mysql, java, css etc. That way when you optimise the server side to the fullest you will have a lighting fast website. If you optimise the server and not the forum software you will end up in a big mess, but if you do it vice versa optimise forum software but not server side you can run it on shared hosting. The software should be tested on preformance on a few default server installs so that like i said push the forum software to the optimysation limits.

 

Yet even with a great server, you couldn't get a fast vBulletin 5 site with decent activity.

Well, maybe on a supercomputer of the kind some scientific laboratory or Google might own, but no reasonable person could.