Dev Diary: Beta 10

suabahasa

i've been waiting so long for stable version. Go Power Rangers! Keep up the great work!

luceos

tankerkiller125 Maybe implement Sentry for those demos?

PS this was done 😉 Thanks for the suggestion.

luceos

I set up a reminder to ping me each three days for an update. Being on vacation I decided to ignore it until I got back. Here's what I have.

What I did:

Write the bylaws of and the blog item about the Foundation. Working on part two.
Patched several issues with the demos.
Released the nightly to discuss.
Fixed an issue with the user comments count being off (flarum/core1695)
Fixed CI, Travis-CI changed how MySQL was booted as a sidecar to the pipeline.

My priority right now is to move forward with the foundation, the IP transfer and overseeing the continued restructuring of our team and processes.

Tirual

luceos I noticed https://nightly.flarum.site runs VERY VERY fast, is it the host or have flarum been uptimized to run even faster? Is it the Recache extension?

luceos

Tirual no optimization done. And only core extensions are installed. Feel fee to check the admin area. I see nothing in our commits that clarify this perceived speed boost from mobile. It's also a pretty simple droplet 2 cpu, 2GB memory without cloudflare really.

clarkwinkelmann

Here are some average numbers I fetched now. I have not logged into nightly.

Nightly has only 1 discussion, whereas discuss has 7000+

These are the response time of each individual request, not the time until the browser starts rendering.

https://nightly.flarum.site/api about 50ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/api (disconnected) 360ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/api (connected) 400-500ms

All info about the forum and the current user. Shouldn't be much impacted by the number of discussions, but if the database is busy it can increase the load time. Each extension also loads its own settings there, so each extension means additional processing.

https://nightly.flarum.site/api/discussions 50-60ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/api/discussions (disconnected) 380ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/api/discussions (connected) 360-400ms

Load time will be directly linked to how many discussions and posts there are on the forum. Extensions can also play a big role by adding new relations.

https://nightly.flarum.site/ 60-150ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/ (disconnected) 560-600ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/ (connected) 640-700ms

The homepage includes the full /api and /discussions payload, so it's roughly those two added up, plus the time to resolve the homepage.

https://nightly.flarum.site/404 40ms
https://discuss.flarum.org/404 (connected and disconnected) 210-220ms

This is a control value. Here almost no data should be fetched from the database (only settings and maybe permissions), so the time to answer with a 404 error can be linked to the server performance, but also the number of extension adding routes and middlewares.

I think the "fast" aspect of nightly is mainly down to these things:

The beta/nightly server has almost no traffic. So even if both nightly and discuss were hosted on servers with the exact same specs, I'd still expect nightly to perform better because no one else is using the webserver or database resources.

There's almost no data in the database. A single discussion, probably very few users. A single tag. etc...

Very few extensions. The more extensions, the longer the loading time could be. But not all extensions will affect the same parts of Flarum. Some might slow down the router, other only specific endpoints.

And on the other side...

If you go to the network tab of the browser you'll notice CSS and JS loading is blazing fast on discuss (<20ms), whereas it's comparably very slow on nightly (between 100 and 200ms for the main JS). It's not noticable when browsing because nightly is so fast to load overall. This I think is basically down to Cloudflare. Discuss is using Cloudflare, nightly isn't.

luceos

clarkwinkelmann Very few extensions. The more extensions, the longer the loading time could be. But not all extensions will affect the same parts of Flarum. Some might slow down the router, other only specific endpoints.

I think to the extension developer performance also has never been something to look at. Creating an Eloquent relation and using it without considering the performance impact and identifying alternative implementation is limited by the extensibility of Flarum.

We should look at performance up until stable and look at ways to guarantee performance by suggesting best practices.. Oh well, food for thought.

RecepBilgin

luceos You do good work on behalf of the forum. I congratulate you. Achievements.

luceos

A small update before the weekend. I haven't spent much time on code since this Monday. What I have been doing is:

Rewriting the agreement with Toby to transfer the ownership of Flarum based on feedback from our lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet.
Writing the "Flarum Foundation: part two" blog item.
Publishing the "Team Expansion" blog item.
Arranging for a first meeting with the notary for the legal set up of Flarum as a Foundation.

I'm absolutely thrilled about the overall progress our team has made technically and organizationally.

matteocontrini

When beta10 is released, would it be possible to have a changelog specifically for extension developers? So that developers can easily find out if they need to adapt the extensions.

Beta9 was supposed not to break any extension but unfortunately some of them stopped working. It would have been useful to have a list of changes for developers, I think.

Franz

matteocontrini Yes, I plan to do that. And, in fact, release it a few days in advance, so that extension authors can prepare. 😉

luceos

Even though I really don't have much in terms of code, these are my Flarum activities of the past six days:

Went to see a notary, discussed our options and decided on the path forward. From the looks of it we should have the Flarum Foundation legally set up this month.
Talked to a bookkeeper to help us with all financial reports and tax statements, because no one really wants to deal with that themselves 😉 .
Continued working on our Strategy and pulled in more of the team to help it move forward.
Assisted more closely the (soon) largest Flarum community on this planet (that I know of), here is the giffgaff preview forum. This community now runs on a commercial product called Khoros (previously Lithium).

luceos

Happy Friday!

What I've done:

Finalized the intellectual property agreement, pending final review and approval by @Toby.
Been investigating whether there would be any benefit of becoming our own fiscal host on the Open Collective. Doing so would pull the bookkeeping responsibilities into our organization, but reduce the costs to only those of the payment processor.
Reached out to the foundation bookkeeper to get a w-8ben-e form signed, which we need for several services in the United States.
Looked at becoming a non profit user of Gsuite for our Flarum mail in the future. Registration requires a w-8ben-e 😉

luceos Assisted more closely the (soon) largest Flarum community on this planet (that I know of), here is the giffgaff preview forum. This community now runs on a commercial product called Khoros (previously Lithium).

Gave personal support on some issues giffgaff had, including an issue with the best answer extension. This community migrated to Flarum this week, see https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21152

Next week Friday we will reach the feature freeze stage for beta 10. I can't wait to see a full summary of all we achieved this period, it already looks impressive!

Lukeman

The giffgaff preview forum looks rather impressive!

Kayo

Lukeman I'm amazed with the style. The fonts, the "hard" borders, everything is perfect.

tankerkiller125

That community is really impressive with what they're doing with Flarum, I'm honestly even more surprised that they've chosen Flarum as their new home. Usually, communities of that size stick with paid products. With that said, however, I think this is a MAJOR milestone for Flarum in proving that it is, in fact, ready for the real world and how well it works. Personally, I've always loved Flarum since I saw it in beta 2

Crypto77777

Hi! I am from Kazakhstan, Central Asia, i like to create and promote websites and forums, i usually work on Xenforo, but recently i found about Flarum and I fell in love to him. I am very waiting a lot Flarum final release! Good luck to you for development flarum! Sorry for my bad english, I hope you understand me 😄

Forest

Awesome!

Franz

Hey folks, for anybody who is interested in contributing their first pull request to Flarum, this would be a nice candidate: flarum/core1222. This would be a nice client-side performance improvement and is fairly easy to implement. 🙂

luceos

11 days ago I posted my latest update, since then:

I signed the papers to set up the Flarum foundation.
I talked to a bookkeeper to help us with our financial statements.
I've done my research on registering trademarks in Europe and the USA.
Prepared the documents to get my fellow board members into the Flarum Foundation.
Talked with the team about roles and responsibilities, something we need formalising much more in the future.

There's been lots of minor things I've been taking care of as well, I can't remember them all 😅

My focus has shifted to a more organisational level, I don't mind too much (although my developer spirit cringes lol). With us professionalising, we would benefit from having more staff though! If you have a skill or want to develop one, feel free to reach out to me or @jordanjay29 on Discord to identify where we could use your help now or in the near future. That would be awesome!

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