luceos Typically yes, but I expect there are other factors at play here such as database size, condition, number of rows etc as well as the extensions and back end infrastructure. My next train of thought is towards the database itself, or MySQL tuning.
In my testing, stripping back all extensions that are not in core made little difference to TTFB or time to a fully operational page.
My 20 day old 0.16 forum with like 50 discussions and 200 posts and 5-6 plugins added on top of core responds under 260ms. It is hosted on 1 VCPU / 2GB Ubuntu 20 , apache, AWS Lightsail. MySQL is hosted on a separate Lightsail RDS server.
@[deleted], at a minimum thanks for posting this! It prompted me to minimize some JavaScript and reduce my extension usage, and do some other things I’ve been meaning to do. I won’t get much faster than a second or two. But, that’s fast compared to where I was at.
askvortsov askvortsov Oh, wanted to add. There's a conflict with PWA, make sure to disable PWA before using it.
Ok, I've installed Clockwork - curious what to do with this extension next as I do not see it listed in Flarum.
[deleted] what kind of server do you use for Flarum https://metabullet.com? How many CPUs/memory?
It feels slightly slower than my forum at 1VCPU/2GB ram lightsail instance.
I compared my Flarum forum (first in the picture) with 2 forums in OP with google page speed. NodeBB wins here as well.
almalino phenomlab what kind of server do you use for Flarum https://metabullet.com? How many CPUs/memory?
It feels slightly slower than my forum at 1VCPU/2GB ram lightsail instance.
It's a 4 CPU core with 8Gb RAM - should not be slow ! 
I too have ~600ms of TTFB but I am on a cheap VPS with a dockerized setup and traefik as a reverse proxy so I can't really complain about that, could it be that the PHP interpreter is more sensitive to cpu stealing (that could explain why an AWS setup has a better TTFB) compared to v8?
Speaking of performance of nodeBB vs flarum it would be more interesting to see the performance of a complete forum compared instead of a vanilla installation IMO, it isn't really interesting to know that nodeBB is faster without messages if for example after 100-200 messages the situation is the opposite.
wonderbeel I agree that our comparison might not show real performance of forums with many messages. Also I guess NodeBB having core running all the time might have problems with scalability as it probably has cache that needs to be shared between instances. Flarum might be better in that respect for bigger forums.
wonderbeel https://phenomlab.com is not an empty forum 
[deleted] why always you use full width layout? I think this not nice on desktop. This make me tired. Also I think flarum's performance enough for your forum. Surely nodebb may be better interms of performance but considering front end is better if forum's traffic level is not too high. I love Flarum because of its design. Of course, tastes and colors are not discussed. I just wanted to share my opinion.
fakruzaruret why always you use full width layout?
Because I personally dislike websites that only use a portion of the screen estate. I see no point in having a huge screen for only 10% of it to be used in a web browser.
fakruzaruret I think this not nice on desktop.
I actually think the reverse.
[deleted] I actually think the reverse.
It actually becomes harder to read when you have a line that is 25 km long. That's why every online newspaper has a fixed-width layout and often quite narrow (e.g. NYT), it's easier to read. That's how print works as well, there are probably studies about this
I don't want to start a war about this though 
matteocontrini It actually becomes harder to read when you have a line that is 25 km long. That's why every online newspaper has a fixed-width layout and often quite narrow (e.g. NYT), it's easier to read. That's how print works as well, there are probably studies about this
Good points. There are studies, yes - in the same line as the "argument" about light and dark themes I guess it's all down to preference, but I do see the points raised by @fakruzaruret - I guess I'm a bit of a stickler with this, but I see the reasoning. I may relent yet....
[deleted] Its not in the admin dashboard? It should be, did it install correctly with composer, to the tagged 0.2 version?
After enabled, you'll want to enable the clockwork browser extension, then log in and visit your site. There should be a new clockwork tab in dev tools.
[deleted] Discuss is running on smaller hardware than this I have a feeling that something isn't quite right with the server setup or hardware the server is on. And of course Discuss is clearly not empty (with thousands upon thousands of post). We've made very minimal changes to default MySQL and PHP settings for discuss as well.
Do you know if your hardware is running HDDs or SSDs? This might have a huge impact on how Flarum performs.
tankerkiller125 It's SSD based. It's not the server either. I can place the same Flarum instance on Hetzner, IONOS, OVH... the performance is exactly the same. This leads be to believe it's not the hardware, but something inside Flarum itself (or one of the extensions - if I disable them all, the speed increases, but nowhere near as fast as NodeBB)
askvortsov I used the @dev tag as you instructed. I can't install 0.2 because it's for Beta 16 (I think)
