Please can you get the server thing sorted out?

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Note what I said. I never said phpBB couldn't support that many users - I said it couldn't support that many users without spending hours tweaking the hell out of it to get it to do what you need. I can guarantee you the complexity of the setup for WP pales in comparison to the phpBB forum.

If you give me 4 db servers, 3 memcache servers, a couple app servers, and a fleet of load balancers I can run whatever you want - but WP doesn't have that kind of budget, and likely never will.

Thanks, that made a huge difference in speed. Looks like a great browser. The only issue I have with it is that the format of this website provides posting text that is washed out looking, with jagged edges. About the only adjustment I've found is that I can override the website font with Arial Black , which is overkill in the "bold" direction. All the other fonts I've tried have jagged edges, which I suppose is because they aren't in the Arial Black bold style.

Spell check is definitely a big improvement, as well.

If anyone has another suggestion that has encountered this issue with Fire Fox and this website formatting issue, with the posting font, I would appreciate the feedback.

The font didn't look any different when I changed from safari to firefox

What kind of tweaks to phpBB would be needed to support more than a small number of users?

DBs (e.g. MySQL) even running on a single server should have no problem handling 1500 simultaneous INSERTs, and I doubt WP ever sees that many simultaneous ones. I kind of doubt MySQL is the issue.

Browsing the phpBB forums, it seems user count is rarely an issue, forum count can become one.

Also, like I said, this has been an ongoing issue for years, and I'd love to hear more about what the problem is. I would go so far as to say I'm still skeptical of your reasons, unless WP's user count is running into the hundreds of thousands.

Refer to http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2090394

phpBB's own forum is running smoothly with 387k users on one DB server.

Just as an example (and by far not the most egregious one) - each post in phpBB 3.0 spawns a variety of DB actions (and I may be missing some):

1 - it INSERTs a new entry into phpbb_posts
2 - by default, it adds the user to the thread watch list in phpbb_topics_watch (SELECT followed by another INSERT)
3 - it updates phpbb_topics_posted (UPDATE or INSERT)
4 - it updates phpbb_users with last post date and number of posts (UPDATE)

And it probably does a lot of other things that I'm not even aware of. Bottom line is it adds up really quickly.

I'm sorry - did you happen to catch the specs of that "one" DB server?



512GB of SSDs, and 64GB of RAM.

So? That's for 387k users, and those system specs are not that crazy. If you guys are that desperate, I'll buy you a server with those specs.

Does it at least combine all of those actions in a single SQL request? If so it still doesn't sound that bad.

a) 387k users with 3751248 posts, vs ~68k users with 4665074 posts.

b) You completely missed the real point - that 1 request != 1 action.

c) buy two, we actually need a spare.

No.

Is it PHP5 compliant? I believe WP Software is not.

Yes, the site runs PHP5

I was changing from IE8. I figured it out. I changed the font smoothing from standard to clear type, on the desktop settings for Windows XP, and it made the fonts in Firefox look identical to how they did in IE8, before I changed over. It is definitely a much better browser, now that the font smoothing is working like it did in IE8.

And a further note, if anyone is using IE8, that is likely a huge part of their frustrations. There was always a couple of seconds hesitation for page downloads, for me before.

Although, I will have to admit, if I was not able to get the font to an equal level of quality, I probably would have stayed with IE8.

I can remember Alex saying the WP software was not completely compliant with Microsoft Explorer, and some people raising a bit of ire over that, because they didn't want to change browsers, in part because they don't like change, but FireFox is free, the download process takes all of 5 minutes, seamless for me, except for the font settings. There is nothing to lose, because one can use both browsers at the same time, if they want to.

I had no idea that leaving Internet Explorer behind and changing to FireFox could possibly make that big of a difference.

Back in the old days, in a comparison between IE and Netscape there really wasn't that much of a difference. Again, I am at the point of not being able to imagine going any faster. I'll likely keep my 8 year old desktop a while longer, since all I use it for is the internet.

I appreciate the advice from coming to this thread, I suggest that anyone that is having problems with this website using a version of internet explorer, give Firefox a try. There is nothing to lose.

Last edited by aghogday on 11 Jun 2012, 11:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for answering that... I wasn't sure.

That'd mean there's a few "Depreciated" values then?

Your issue with IE8 sounds symptomatic of a spyware/malware plugin. Definitely check your plugins.

Last I checked, WP was working alright in IE, but I use Chrome now. Both IE and Chrome are faster than FF for me in typical cases, and are close enough to each other in speed that I just use Chrome "because".

I wish plugins didn't have as much control as they do. I believe that's true of any browser. IE just a more frequent malware target.

That font issue kept me from using FF back in the day when it was (IMO) more competitive on performance. Pages didn't render the same as they did in IE, and I preferred the way they looked in IE. All good these days.