Open up the WP code

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Since everyone's complaining that WP is so slow, and obviously not much is happening on Alex's end, I was thinking maybe we, the users, could chip in.

I know there are several technical people on here (including myself) who would have a look and see if there are obvious parts where it's slow, so why not open up the code to WP? I mean, it's not like anyone's earning money off this code and it's originally just a customized version of PHPBB.

I'm not saying I'm going to spend massive amounts of time hacking on some fugly PHP script, but this slowdown is annoying enough that it makes me feel very helpless. If this happens with a software project I use, I generally tend to open up the code and do some investigating. You would be surprised how many obvious performance improvements are overlooked in some projects....

You a BSD guy? Unrelated, I know, but I've been meaning to try BSD. The partitioner won't obey me, though.

Anyways, there are several fairly simple things that could be done to improve performance. For one, the site could archive old threads- say ones that haven't seen any activity in 3 months. That would help a great deal. Also, we could delete the 10,000 or so accounts that have been opened and never used. But, Alex has already indicated an unwillingness to do either of these (unless I am mistaken) so it looks like we'll just have to suffer through the slowness.

Also, I understand WP is using an old version of phpbb, with worse performance than could be obtained with the current version.

Yep, a big time BSD'er. Which BSD are we talking about? I'm a NetBSD guy, and I think you will find the NetBSD Guide to be a very useful step-by-step intro. FreeBSD has something similar, their Handbook.

edit: Come to think of it, I assume you actually already read that. You are welcome to join #netbsd on irc.freenode.net. I'm usually there, and many other very friendly and helpful people are, too. If you're having trouble with the installer, we'll gladly help you out. There's also a #freebsd channel on this same IRC network.



Yep, these would both help a lot. Laying good indexes on the tables would definitely help, as would enabling and investigating the slow query log (assuming MySQL). There's lots of simple tricks that can help a lot.



Did he give a reason for not wanting to do this?



I can understand not wanting to upgrade, if the upgrade procedure is grueling (as these kinds of things often tend to be), or if there are too many custom hacks that would be hard to port.

It was FreeBSD, though I'm open to anything that will run on PowerPC.


My impression is that there is a desire to keep the member count high. As far as not archiving, this is second-hand, but I have been told that Alex wants to keep all the threads open in case someone finds them useful and wants to post in them.

send a PM to Lau (he's our Admin) with the link to this thread! Great ideas!

Merle

PM is on its way!