Welcome to WebmasterWorld, dulldull.

I haven't done a serious installation with either, but people here have mentioned PunBB and SMF as being fairly lightweight and responsive.

Thanks rogerd for your warm welcome. :>

PunBB seems to be a what i'm looking for and I'm going to give a try.

And I just found that Wikipedia has run a list of free internet forum script.
[en.wikipedia.org...]

phpbb3 is very light on CPU resources compared to phpbb2, I'm not sure how it stacks up against other forum software.

phpBB1.4.x (vanilla) = index.php in ~0.070 seconds
phpBB2.0.0-ish (without template cache) => index.php in ~0.500 seconds
phpBB2.0.5-ish (with template cache) => index.php in ~0.250 seconds
phpBB3.0 CVS (vanilla) => index in ~0.080 seconds
phpBB3.0 CVS (with eAccelerator) => index.php in ~0.016 seconds

Dual Pentium III-S 1.26 GHz, 1.5GiB RAM & 2x 60GB HDDs in RAID1

[area51.phpbb.com...]

Those are not current numbers but I believe its actually faster now. :) One thing that has been mentioned by the developers that I have read is some of the performance tweaks are intended for larger forums and may actually slow down smaller ones.

Those are impressive comparison numbers, coalman. Sounds like the developers really focused on performance in 3.0.

I'm wondering if I'm going to trim the code in viewtopic.php and index.php and shed more unnecessary footers and headers info, avoid loading the database to show something like the number of posts a user submit, will it boost the performance further?

Still struggling with Punbb and Phpbb.... The trouble with punbb is that it cuts too many functions, some of them like PM are quite useful. Although they have a mod for current version, I worry about the future upgrade.

I can't give you any specifics on editing the code because it's really beyond my knowledge where to start, I know just enough php to be dangerous. However one of the reasons for the increased performance is because it uses a cache.

You can reduce the server load quite a bit by turning features off. On the main page of the ACP on the very bottom is bunch of links for the configuration that will let you turn features on or off like displaying Who's online, Birthdays, The search feature etc.

If you open config.php you'll find these two lines at the bottom:

// define('DEBUG', true);
// define('DEBUG_EXTRA', true);

If you uncomment them you'll get some basic information for SQL queries and execution time in the footer with a link to detailed information.