Great chat features but poor performance

[max]

phpFreeChat has great features and it has a great future, but only if they can fix the performance issues.
Right now it can't handle more than a thousands users, I could estimate less than 100 with a high performance server like this:

3mhz Intel Pentium CPU
2GB of Ram
Linux using the fast cache ram.

I have done all the things they recommend ( using fast cache in linux, having a delay, etc, etc ) but I clearly see that this chat uses a lot of CPU with very few users.

I have seen chats that use java that can handle thousands of users using less than 40% on a same server.

This chat is build to handle less than 50 concurrent users with a dedicated server, this makes impossible to use it for a high traffic site.

I don't understand why they don't tell all of this, and also I don
t understand why they don't show specs of concurrent users to show how poor this chat handles a lot of users.

I have faith the programers can fix the performance issues, if they can't and keep building more and more features instead of focusing on the performance issue they will not have a winner chat.

[phpfreechat]

I have some ideas to improve the performances. I will do it as a priority for the next release.
As you have a lot of chat users, could you help me to test these improvments before releasing it ?

[max]

Yes of course I can help you Stepahne.

[phpfreechat]

Ok, I just worked on CPU and read/write disk access optimizations. I committer my code in the subversion (trunk revision 905). Could you test this new code and give me some feedback ?