Advice on migrating to Flarum for large-scale forum

taddis

Hello guys!

I’ve been hanging around discuss.flarum.org on and off for a couple of years and I even did a small contribution to the code base at some point 😊

I work for a company that runs a forum service. We are about to move away from this legacy Symfony code base. The current forum have the normal functionality like Groups, Private messages, Image uploads etc. So we will most likely need a couple of custom plugins.

I’ve been searching and reading about performance etc. on the forum and is a little bit worried to make the leap without consulting you guys.

Our current forum consists of:

+500 thousand users
+5 million threads (discussions)
+100 million messages (posts)
about 10 threads (discussions) with +200 thousand messages (posts)
about 400 threads (discussions) with +40 thousand messages (posts)
about 500 concurrent users.

In our current system we have solved a lot of pain points with table sharding for almost all type of data that exceeds a certain threshold.

I am currently filling up a database with fake data, using migratetoflarum/fake-data 👍️ , so that we can run some tests. It takes a while to get up to the 100 million posts range 😅

So what do you think. Will a switch to Flarum be a good fit or will we end up with a lot of headaches?

Kind regards,

GreXXL

taddis (maybe not wholly unbiased) I think Flarum will be a great fit. Of course, you will need some plugins - as Flarum core is built around minimum features and maximum extendability. Flarum does support scalability features like Redis, etc. There are large (even enterprise) communities running on Flarum - here are some samples:

You can also find other samples at https://builtwithflarum.com/.
Like with most, maybe all Forum software, Mega-Threads/Discussions are always a challenge - but we are discussing possibilities to improve this: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/33635-improve-handling-of-mega-discussions-20k-posts

You could also get in touch with our partners (https://flarum.org/partners) who have larger-scale operating experience. We are also happy to take any questions you have here so we can best support you on your journey. We'd be glad to see another big Flarum community out there.

luceos

Hi taddis

500 concurrent users is not a real issue. I think there are some areas where Flarum could do better, but none of them are really blocking for larger communities.

I represent Blomstra (now Flarum BV), the Turkish happy moms community is hosted with us (https://forum.mutluanneleriz.com/, peaking to several thousands concurrently). We operate our managed Flarum on Kubernetes. We are open about all our learnings and I will do my best to answer any specific question you might have related to scalable hosting.

As for sharding. There have been no attempts for Flarum, that I know of, to implement that, but it would be fantastic to have.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

OMG

I would not particularly lean towards recommending Flarum at the moment due to the existing issue mentioned here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32646-fttb-slow-response-time

I have set up a new Flarum installation without installing any extensions, and I still encountered this problem. Unless you have developed an extension that automatically deletes notifications beyond a certain quantity.

Or you can try to reproduce the problem to confirm

taddis

Thank you guys for your input! We will figure out which plugins we need and then do some tests etc. I'll get back to you on our progress. 🙏