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Powerful, secure, affordable forum software
R1CHboard is my slowly ongoing message board / forum software. It's written in perl and been redesigned from scratch
about three times now, and only now am I happy with the performance and compatibility that I am continuing development.
I strive to make the forums 100% secure, extremely fast, easily customisable and fully standards compliant. To achieve
this goal, R1CHboard makes use of:
- Fast mySQL database to store all messages, settings, etc
- mod_fastcgi for Apache for extremely fast script execution
- Full HTML 4.01/Transitional and CSS2 compliance to ensure maximum compatibility
- Optional on-the-fly page compression to speed up transfers and reduce bandwidth usage
- Powerful, easy to use web-based admin facility to configure the forums exactly how you want
- A lot of options for members to configure the forums the way they want
- Free for non-profit websites and competetive pricing for commercial sites
Since this is a work-in-progress, there isn't anything really to show off. All the development is done on my
linux box locally and you'll probably only see the forums if you idle in #gloom while I'm asking for tests etc. As
not to make this page a complete waste of time, here are some screenshots of the current layout. Keep in mind this
doesn't really show you much about the forums at all except for the default style.
Most forum pages are created and ready to send in under 10ms, with some pages taking less than 1ms. That is pretty damn fast.
For comparison, PHP and mySQL is about the same speed; however PHP is subject to longer initial load times, no
connection/data persistence and as such, under heavy load the perl/fastcgi/mySQL combination used by R1CHboard wins
every time.
The very first version of R1CHboard was a flat-file based system which was pretty fast, but lacked greatly as the
amount of data increased. I decided it was time to use a mySQL database, and the next version of R1CHboard was a simple
run once and exit CGI perl script, akin to many other forums. This in practice turned into extremely long (100ms+) page generation
times due to having to connect to the database, set up queries, etc every invocation. The script persistence provided
by mod_fastcgi solves that problem and allows for a lot more flexibility. |
