Not just a pretty face

January 14, 2015

PlushForums takes just 0.5 seconds to fully render a page. Discourse takes 3.1 seconds.

One of the ways we keep Plush fast is by keeping your pages lean. Plush downloads six times less CSS and Javascript code than Discourse, which makes a huge difference, especially on mobile connections. But because we do less work on your device, it means we have to do more work on our servers.

Fortunately, we have something called HipHopVM in our arsenal. This is a tool written by Facebook to power their own service. In their words, "HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance."

And they're not kidding. HHVM gives us a 152% speed boost over PHP 5.5, which is more commonly used. That makes for a better service and happier communities.