Use of Dolphin Community Buider under special conditions

Hi,

I am waiting for Dolphin 8 to to be released so that I can build a community around my wordpress blog. Though Dolphin is a dating software but I want to use it for my community coz I think it is a complete package in its own, leaving behind all the bugs.

I have a few questions:

• Somewhere I read that all membership softwares requires very high RAM to suppot members, e.g 1GB Ram per 35 members. Is it true for Dolphin as well?? How resource intensive is Dolphin??

• I am planning to use Dolphin on shared hosting, disabling all sound, video and chat modules (My host has agreed on the said conditions). I will be using the basic modules like blogs, articles, forums, profiles, IM, email etc. Is it advisable to use Dolphin on shared server with such modules??

• Is there possibility of integrating other scripts with Dolphin like if in future we want to shift to Vbulletin instead of Orca forum or integrating wordpress multisite instead of using default blogs modules??

 1 - resource use depends on what your members are doing, how your site is set up etc... 

Impossible to say that 1GB serves 35 members. 

Ive had thousands of members running on 4GB server with no problems.

2 - You wont get far with shared server. VPS minimum, dedicated if you're looking at a community of any size - or charging for use. Shared will bring a whole host of problems for you...

3 - Check the market. There are integrations available for other forums.

Good luck!

Dolphin isn't a dating script (at least, not anymore).  It has more social than dating features these days, despite it being based on a dating script.  You can disable the dating features without too much effort.

 So that means boonex dolphin on a shared server is a big NO NO even if you disable most of the resource intensive modules (chat, sounds, files, videos etc..) !!!

But I didn't get one thing that why the basic modules like forum, profiles, articles, blogs etc would create problems as they do not require that much server processing??

Most of the people here are on shared hosting, but these sites aren't exactly on fire when it comes to traffic or real members. How much traffic are you getting on your blog currently?

 Yes you may think those modules would not be.. My old hosting provider Arvixe, shut me down just because of spammers using the site. When spammers are on the site sql database usages were above their (Arvixe) limits.

example usage notice, and this is with no chat, or anything other than bloggers.

I now run all my sites on a DS @ hostdime and one DS server at home for testing b4 going to live server

 I found this today and thought it would help you in your research.

http://dolphin7.com/ 

sample graph from research, this show when they starting using Dolphin, you can plainly see the jump at the beginning of May.

"Every time i benchmark the dolphin suite the mysql is the one that always go 100% first before anything else and that’s just when i test the front page. Even if i run all the modules on the front page that is cacheable it’s still a a problem mysql that runs at 100%."

The big difference in Dolphin 7 (in comparison to Dolphin 6 or other scripts) is that it has a lot of periodic requests - which cause considerable load to the server. If you can disable periodic requests or at least increase the time between them – I believe it can help a lot.

Here is a list of default AJAX updates you can try to alter:

1. Spy refresh time: http://www.your-site.com/m/spy/administration/
2. Member menu update time: inc/classes/BxDolMemberMenu.php file, the following string – var $iBubblesUpdateTime = 60000; // in milliseconds;
3. Shoutbox update time: http://www.your-site.com/modules/index.php?r=shoutbox/administration/
4. Simple messenger update time: http://www.your-site.com/administration/settings.php?cat=101
5. Flash Video Messenger update time: dolphin admin -> modules -> flash apps -> messenger -> update interval, or it is better to uninstall one of the messengers.