Re: The future of the Lua Forums

[Stefan <stefan@...>]

On 09/30/2013 01:21 PM, Coda Highland wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
> > I am not sure writing new forum software is a good idea.
>
> While I agree with you in the sense that this is a very large wheel to
> be reinventing, I unfortunately can't recommend any other existing
> forum software because they all have major problems of some sense or
> another. (If I *had* to recommend one, it'd probably be vBulletin, but
> that's not free.)
>
> > 20 requests per second is not that much, it should not be a problem for PHP.
>
> For SHARED hosting that's a pretty heavy load! For dedicated hosting,
> sure, that'd be no problem at all.
>
> /s/ Adam

Indeed, the current host is a $50/month shared VM with a 5GB monthly 
cap. The new host will be a $20/month dedicated VM with a 2GB monthly cap.

The likely root issue is that the off-the-shelf forum software is just 
too heavy for what is actually needed. Image posting, graphical avatars, 
full-featured user profiles - those things are not required for a 
programming language forum.

As to my preference to use Lua; some reference info on PHP versus Lua 
for transactional web systems:

The same lightweight VM using PHP versus Lua, everything else being 
equal, including database backend and using comparable scripts:

PHP (fastCGI) = 115/s
PHP (mod_php) = 243/s
Lua (mod_lua) = 712/s

The memory footprint is less then half with Lua as well. And I realize 
that Apache's fastCGI is not the fastest.

Perhaps my PHP foo is old and crusty. Perhaps Lua inspired me to write 
some truly ninja code. Perhaps even the test case was slanted to Lua's 
(and mod_lua's) unique strengths.

But Lua has proven itself a robust web technology to me time and time 
again over the last few years.

--
Stefan