Interview – John Percival from vBulletin

SP: There's been an influx of forums software onto the market, and the interest in open source software grows all the time. In future, will you continue to charge users for licenses, or are you looking at other ways to generate revenue as the market becomes more competitive?

vBulletin has the huge advantage over open source projects in that we can pay people to provide support. Therefore, if you purchase a license, you are guaranteed that we will provide you with support in all ways we can. This can involve logging on to people's servers, offering help by email, and liaising with server administrators to improve performance.

Despite the fact that the market is becoming more competitive, vBulletin continues to gain popularity. We're not sitting back and resting on our laurels, but rather continuing the exciting development of vBulletin 3.

SP: There are all kinds of sites on the Web -- from hobbyists to large enterprises. How does vBulletin fit into the Websites of these different classes of customer?

From a technical point of view, vBulletin can handle sites of all sizes -- from the smallest bulletin board to the largest community -- given the correct hardware. We have several customers with millions of posts in their database, so there are no scaling issues. This is all achievable on run-of-the-mill hardware too.

Our low price makes the product very attractive for small-medium sites. We're also working on providing more solutions for our enterprise level customers, with more inclusive Support options and support for other enterprise-level database engines.

SP: I understand that you're rewriting vBulletin for the version 3.0 release. You just rewrote the core engine for vBulletin 2.0 - why rewrite it again? What sacrifices did you have to make in order to improve the performance of vBulletin in version 2?

vBulletin 3 is not going to be a complete rewrite in the same way vBulletin 2 was. We're looking at what we have learnt in creating vBulletin 2 -- we'll keep the best bits and making them better, and take the not-so-good bits and rework them. The code is being designed with performance and scalability in mind, while keeping things as modular as possible. The only sacrifices that we make in order to improve performance is developer time -- if a feature is going to be included we make sure that we spend the extra time on it, ensuring it'll perform under all different conditions.

The biggest improvements that we were able to make on the vBulletin 2 were the SQL queries -- this is how vBulletin and PHP interface with the database. We were able to improve the way these queries were made, and the number of queries the system could handle, so that the code was a lot faster.

SP: Do you have any recommended resources for PHP/MySQL developers who want to learn how to optimize their code for high performance conditions such as those to which vBulletin is regularly exposed?

The MySQL Website is a good place, and the Paul DuBois MySQL book is a good reference too. However, the best experience is gained by actually trying and tinkering with code yourself. See what kind of code works, what doesn't, and learn by trial-and-improvement. You'll soon start to pick up a few tricks. One thing that we've learnt in developing vBulletin for its varied environments is to have as few queries on the page as possible.

SP: Where do you draw the line between incorporating user-requested features, and optimizing the product's performance?

User-requested features are usually included based on how popular they are. If a feature proves to be very popular, we'll start to look at ways to include it in the vBulletin code in a way that won't hit the performance significantly.

There are almost always several different ways to implement a feature, and we always look at the best-performing method, over the easiest-to-program method. If there's going to be the possibility that people are not going to want a particular feature, or it might be a bit too resource-hungry for some people, we put in an option so that the administrator of the board has the final choice.

SP: Can you share with us some of the new features of vBulletin 3.0 that haven't yet been made public?

We're not revealing too much right now, as a lot of it is still being worked on, so we don't have full details available yet. From the admin perspective, the control panel is being revamped, including a much improved templates system, and a more comprehensive security/permissions system. From an end-user point of view, the interface will be much improved, with the option of threaded views on messages. The user control panel has also been enhanced, but we can't say much more than that yet!

You never know, but before long you might find vBulletin powering your whole Website, not just your forums! ;-)

SP: A little trivia: what's the largest number of users that have ever used a vBulletin system at the same time? What sort of hardware was required to accomplish this feat? What's the largest community that's running vBulletin that you know of?

Unfortunately, I can't mention the names or URLs of our customers. However, we have seen forums with more than 1100 users online at the same time, another with over 170,000 registered members, and another with in excess of 3 million posts. So it should handle most day-to-day forums without too much trouble!

To power forums that large does require quite a large server setup, though. I'd think that they probably have two servers, one for the database, and one for the Web server. Each would probably be a Dual-P3 1Ghz machine with 2GB RAM, SCSI hard disks. That's just a guess, but with the falling cost of servers, a server that size wouldn't be unreasonable for a large site.

SP: What are the plans for vBulletin's future? Will you be sticking with message boards and related systems, or are there plans to branch out into other products or services?

Well I think that I've dropped a couple of hints through the other questions, so go back and have another read! We plan to stick with Website development tools for the near future, along similar lines to what we've done so far. We've been working on a few deals with ISPs over the last few weeks, so watch the vBulletin Website for an announcement and more details very soon!

vBulletin will continue to be actively developed, and we will be trying to keep on the cutting edge of technology, making sure that our customers are fully supported, and have the most comprehensive bulletin board available to them at a low cost.