In a discussion titled ‘Discourse vs vbulletin5’ under the Support category, testuser2 is evaluating Discourse as a replacement for vBulletin5 for a large-scale community site expecting over 1,000 daily posts and 100,000+ daily unique visitors. They’re seeking examples of large Discourse communities and want to know about scalability, performance, and integration with PHP-based systems — especially since their team is PHP-focused and they plan to use Discourse for comments across their site. ondrej directs them to Discourse customers, citing Infinite Flight as a major example. pfaffman clarifies that while initial setup can run on a powerful server without immediate need for Ruby expertise, managing large-scale deployments may require a Discourse specialist. For customization, he notes that CSS, Ember, and JavaScript are more critical than Ruby — suggesting that PHP developers can adapt with some learning. testuser2 acknowledges this and feels confident their team can handle the frontend technologies. The conversation highlights Discourse’s suitability for large communities, its unique scaling model, and the learning curve for PHP-centric teams.
I’m just thinking about using discourse instead of vbulletin5 to start a new community for a larger website.
Are there any examples for discourse on big communities, with +1000 new postings per day?
And whats your experience with scalability and performance of the discourse system on large websites with +100000 unique/day?
I’m searching for a highly flexible system. We need SSO and we would use it also for comments, which would mean that parts of discourse would be loaded on nearly each site.
The mainproblem I have is, that nearly all stuff on this website is in php/mysql and the dev-team is also working in php only so long. Is it easy to work with discourse for highly skilled php developers, or do I need a ruby guy for this?
It depends on what you’re taking about. If you’re asking about managing a large scale system with scaling and such, Discourse does things in a unique way and you’ll probably want a Discourse expert. To start, though, a standard install on a beefy server should serve you well until your community is generating money. You’re not going to have thousands of users over night.
As far as customization is concerned, it’s probably not ruby that’s so important but css, ember, and javascript. Your php guys will likely need a bit of work to get up to speed.
