Hey been with phpbb since 2004 so transferring a decent size forum. Right now I’m two days in 303139/2167314 (14%) 446 per min. How can I speed it up? I’m on digital ocean and only using 4% CPU. Redis keeps timing out on me. I have have attachments turned off.

A few useful details would help narrow this down: Droplet size: RAM, vCPU count, disk type/size The exact import command you are running Your app.yml resource-related settings, with secrets removed, especially: UNICORN_WORKERS db_shared_buffers db_work_mem Whether the import is running inside t…

My updated log script/import_scripts/phpbb3.rb:15:in ‘’ 302570 / 2167314 ( 14.0%) [448 items/min] Exception while creating post 304683. Skipping. Waited 1.0 seconds /var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.4.0/gems/redis-client-0.28.0/lib/redis_client/ruby_connection/buffered_io.rb:214:in ‘bloc…

Seems to be working though, not complaining. so far stopped unicorn disabled attachments and avatars

That droplet size looks reasonably strong for this kind of import, so I would not expect UNICORN_WORKERS to be the main limiter here. A couple of observations: Stopping Unicorn is probably fine for an import-only/staging container, but it likely will not massively speed up the importer itself. At…

The bulk importers are orders of magnitude faster, but harder to configure and make work.

[image] Ethsim2: the bottleneck may be database I/O, the source phpBB MySQL query side, Most of the time, this is it. I’ve been able to speed up the import by adding indexes, creating views, and tweaking the database settings. I suggest you invest a bit of time on that because if you find an …

Still moving along though! var/www/discourse/script/import_scripts/phpbb3/importer.rb:38:in 'ImportScripts::PhpBB3::Importer#execute' /var/www/discourse/script/import_scripts/base.rb:47:in 'ImportScripts::Base#perform' /var/www/discourse/script/import_scripts/phpbb3/importer.rb:22:in 'ImportScripts…

It finished but I forgot to import the passwords so I have to start over :frowning: This time im going to prune some post though. I prob have a half million jello and count down posts lol. Thanks for the advice

PHPBB to Discourse Migration Speed Optimization

Support Migration

Mattash (Matt) May 22, 2026, 12:30pm 10

1746813 / 2167314 (80.6%) [353 items/min]

Topic		Replies	Views
My phpBB Migration Journey (postgresql) Migration phpbb	23	1923	March 30, 2023
Migrate a phpBB3 forum to Discourse Migrating to Discourse how-to	467	100000	September 4, 2025
phpBB 3 Importer (old) Feature	90	17397	October 8, 2014
Migrate a vBulletin 4 forum to Discourse Sysadmins how-to	183	30971	November 9, 2025
Migrate an IPB 3.1 forum to Discourse Sysadmins how-to	5	5655	January 29, 2025

PHPBB to Discourse Migration Speed Optimization

Related topics