Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

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Christopher Shilts
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Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

After trying out various forum software, the best options seem to be either PHPBB3 or MyBB 1.8.26 for a community board I'm planning to deploy.

The only potential dealbreaker I see with PHPBB3 is its lack of quota's for user attachments (which MyBB supports out of the box). While PHPBB does have a board wide quota, I haven't been able to find a way to prevent a few users from eating up the available storage space on a server. Is this a problem on production sites, or am I worrying about nothing? This seems to be the only downside I could find to using PHPBB3.

Also, I was curious about how healthy is the project. Do you think it will still be around in 10-20 years? There's a lot of competitors for forum software out there, which makes me a little concerned about continued support during my board's lifespan.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing from you folks.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Kailey »

Welcome to phpBB! :)
Christopher Shilts wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:39 pm The only potential dealbreaker I see with PHPBB3 is its lack of quota's for user attachments (which MyBB supports out of the box). While PHPBB does have a board wide quota, I haven't been able to find a way to prevent a few users from eating up the available storage space on a server. Is this a problem on production sites, or am I worrying about nothing? This seems to be the only downside I could find to using PHPBB3.
I'm not familiar with MyBB's offering, but I've never had a problem with attachments eating up storage space. That's not to say it couldn't be a problem, especially if you are running a board focused primarily on images.

That being said, there are fairly extensive settings under ACP -> POSTING tab -> Attachment settings, albeit controlling attachments board-wide. You could also request this functionality in the Extension Requests forum. I could see this being useful for some board owners, so maybe someone would be willing to take up the task.
Christopher Shilts wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:39 pm Also, I was curious about how healthy is the project. Do you think it will still be around in 10-20 years? There's a lot of competitors for forum software out there, which makes me a little concerned about continued support during my board's lifespan.
phpBB has been around for almost 21 years. There's active development as well as support. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

Thanks for the welcome, Kailey.

I looked into per user / group attachments quota's on these forums, and there where several requests, but they never went anywhere. I also see there's the possibility of hiring someone to create an extension. Do you have any idea what paid extension development typically costs?

And I'm glad to hear the project has such a good track record.

Also, I'd like to thank the team for staying a-political in the official publications such as social media, and the blog. A lot of groups seem compelled to wear their political beliefs on their sleeves and shout down anyone with an opposing view. It's refreshing to see a more professional approach to this. In fact that's one of the reasons I've been giving PHPBB3 strong consideration- you folks don't shove your politics down everyone's throats.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Kailey »

Christopher Shilts wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 12:53 am I also see there's the possibility of hiring someone to create an extension. Do you have any idea what paid extension development typically costs?
Unfortunately, that would be a discussion you would have with the extension developer if you choose to post in the Wanted forum.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

Alright, thanks for the information. I'm probably not going to be needing that functionality for awhile. And maybe it will turn out to be a non-issue, like you said. It's been ages since I ran a board, and a lot has changed.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by thecoalman »

Unless you are creating forum where it might be extensively abused or are going to allow video/audio uploads I wouldn't worry about it. phpBB allows you to set max dimensions on images, if the image exceeds those dimensions it will be resized client side to fit within those dimensions. As one example a 1200px*1200px max size is fairly generous, after resizing it might average out to about 300KB including a generous thumbnail at 300px*300px. My host lists 20GB storage for their $7/month shared hosting plan, that would accommodate 65K images.

My forum is pushing 20 years and the attachment feature is quite popular. I worried about the storage early on and had low max dimensions set, in hindsight I wish I was a little more generous because those early images are pretty damn small on larger screens. The storage limits imposed by the hosting plans I have had never played a factor, as the forum grew so did the plan to support it for reasons other than storage. I have 50GB to spare right now, ;)
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

Thanks for the info Coalman, I'll keep that in mind.

I found a host for the email server that offers 512MB of RAM and 15GB of storage for $3 a month. As for the webserver, I'm wondering if it can get by on that little until it's built up some interest. If not, hopefully the next step up that offers 1GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, and 35GB SSD for $5 a month will be sufficient.

I hear PHP doesn't do multithreading, so I've been under the impression each CPU core gets tied up processing one page load at a time. So if the server has one core, users have to get in line to load their pages. Is this correct?

Also, a 20 year forum is pretty impressive. Is it the one about coal?
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by thecoalman »

I don't know what your needs are but those server specs should be more than sufficient for fairly active forum as long as you are not using WHM/Cpanel or similar software.
Christopher Shilts wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 1:14 pm I hear PHP doesn't do multithreading, so I've been under the impression each CPU core gets tied up processing one page load at a time. So if the server has one core, users have to get in line to load their pages. Is this correct?
Not my field of expertise, I'm a one band and know what I need to know. What I can tell you is the server I currently have is about triple the specs you posted and it doesn't blink with 300 active users online, not that 300 active users online is normal. I do have 4 times the RAM but I use WHM/Cpanel, Sphinx and OpCache all of which need RAM. One feature in phpBB is Sphinx search backend, it needs to be installed and configured on server including allocation of RAM.

As far as my site is indeed about coal, it's my only little niche on the Internet. ;)
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

I'm comfortable deploying LEMP stacks via VPS over a SSH terminal. Pretty much the only stuff that would be running on the webserver is the OS, NGINX, Postgresql, and the websites. From my experience this typically uses very little RAM, although from time to time there's a need to overflow into a pagefile (usually from compiling something).

I'll have to look into that Sphinx search. I was under the impression PHPBB3 came with a search out of the box. I probably should have installed it on XAMPP to test instead of simply relying on the official demo. And it sounds like I won't be having many performance problems, judging from your figures.

Hey, niche communities form an important role. It seems there's an interest in anything, no matter how obscure.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by thecoalman »

Christopher Shilts wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 3:09 pm I was under the impression PHPBB3 came with a search out of the box.
It does but can be slow since it's database driven and of course you have the overhead. The search index tables in phpBB can easily exceed the posts table. Sphinx is optional and of course will only work if you can install it on the server. It creates it's own indexes and loads them into RAM, search result pages are as fast if not faster than regular pages and of course you avoid the database overhead leaving you more resources for other needs. Since you can configure it independently of phpBB there is a lot more options on the table. It's usefulness depends on the size of the site, a small site it won't make much if any difference.

I have not tried to install it in XAMPP environment, I just switch to regular database on test board if I'm doing anything with search.
I won't be having many performance problems, judging from your figures.
Right now I have it down to about 150ms for most pages, I'm eager to find out how well php8 performs. I was reading about JIT. Between that and Opcache apparently I can expect significant improvement. I would love to break that 100 barrier. :D

Edit: To clarify that time is being reported by browser. Execution time reported by php on index page is 0.019, about 0.030 for viewtopic and viewforum pages :D
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Christopher Shilts
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by Christopher Shilts »

That's good information to know, thanks.

And that's a very impressive execution time. So you're saying PHPBB3 loads a page in 0.03 ms? That's an absolutely fantastic load time, considering the database has to be read. I would have been impressed if that's done in 100ms.
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Re: Is PHPBB3 a good fit for my community?

Post by thecoalman »

That is correct but those are more on the optimal end of what you can expect, your mileage will vary. It is a quick average from selecting random pages in viewforum or viewtopic. Keep in mind I'm on VPS that has SSD, various tweaks like properly setting up Opcache and it is currently not under enormous load for various reasons. Mostly because of the season but I'm also behind Cloudflare, the server doesn't see a lot of requests for cachable files and I'm blocking various countries/ASN's. Forum has 41K topics and about 750K posts so it's not exactly small database.
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