Joomla! Discussion Forums

After a lot of research, it looks like Joomla is the best free content management system available. My website - http://lowendmac.com/ - is a hodge-podge of HTML, XHTML, PHP scripts, a tiny bit of Javascript (mostly to obscure email addresses), CSS, and some legacy pages designed using tables. I have a few issues I need to address, this being the most important:

Server Load: Our host is very concerned about this and has heard that Joomla stresses a server. I've read a lot about Joomla and its caching options, and it doesn't sound like this is going to be a problem. However, Joomla will allow us to add forums and some other community features, which could result in an increased server load vs. our current setup.

Stats: We serve 40-50,000 pages most weekdays with rare spikes approaching 60,000 hits. That's 20-25,000 visits, and in a typical month 300-350,000 people visit the site. We are on a shared server which has survived being slashdotted several times.

I need to be able to provide our host with information comparing Joomla to other content management systems in terms of server load and advice on configuring Joomla and the server for excellent performance.

On a related topic, I'd like to set things up so visitors to the side won't see discussions at the end of articles unless they choose to, either by clicking a "discuss this article" link or registered users choosing it as a user preference. I'm sure this would help with page generation for the vast majority of visitors who read and run, also improving overall performance as these pages could be cached for a much longer time than ones with discussion.

Finally, am I better off using a separate subdomain (such as forums.lowendmac.com) for our forums or keeping them part of the primary domain?

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback.

Dan Knight, LowEndMac.com

Dan,

I had another customer ask about Joomla performance before and I wasn't able to give them exact numbers/statistics. I was thinking about trying to do some performance tests to try to come up with some real numbers (maybe comparing Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal on the same server), but haven't had the time.

The only thing I can say is that joomla.org is running on Joomla and they are currently handling 5x the traffic of your site, currently, so I think you are safe:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/LowEndMac.com+joomla.org/

Depending on the extension you use for discussions, there might be a setting for it to not show by default or allow the user to configure it to show/hide. I would suggest looking at the JED and seeing what some of the comments extensions allow:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/contacts-and-feedback/articles-comments

I don't think you gain anything by having your forums on another domain. If you use a component like Kunena, it is built into Joomla and will live on the same domain:
http://www.kunena.com/

On my site, I actually use PHPBB, but it lives on the same domain as well and I'm able to use the RokBridge extension to allow the two to stay sync'd up.


Let me know if you have more questions. Welcome to Joomla!