We're currently running 6.5.2 and about to move to 6.5.5. I'm going to be investigating 7 at the same time. Can anyone estimate for me how much downtime will be required to move to 7.0? We currently have about 4.5 million posts, almost 64,000 users, etc.

I don't think the users will mind reasonable downtime as long as they know roughly how long it will be.

Chuck

That's a good question. The threads importer goes pretty fast, but 4.5 million posts is huge so it's hard to even fathom. I'm reluctant to even give a ballpark figure as with that amount of posts I might be way off On a fairly fast server it will do about 15,000 topics per hour, that's including all of the replies. So it somewhat depends on how many topics you have, not just posts.

The way it's currently written is it does 20 topics per refresh. If it's your own server you might be able to modify the script to do a bit more per refresh that could speed it up a bit.

Thanks Rick. I was afraid of that. Any pointers as to what would need to be modified?

Also, would it be possible to:

1. Close the 6.5.5 forums long enough to dump the database.
2. Open the 6.5.5 forums noting the time of the last post.
3. Import the forums to a new 7.0 installation.
4. Close the 6.5.5 forums and dump the transactions since the original dump.
5. Import those (small number) of topics.
6. Open up the 7.0 forums?

Chuck

Line 739 and line 748 of threads_import.php would need to be changed. Say you wanted to do 50 topics at a time. You'd need to change line 739 to 50 instead of 20, and then line 748 you'd change to 51 instead of 21.

As for only importing the new topics created after the database dump. Unforunately not. All of the importers are just capable of doing a full import.

Re timings - we have about a million posts with almost 100,000 topics - it took 11 hours to do the import. I had duplicated the database so the original database stayed up - but it did mean that the server was fairly busy at the time.

So far the average seems to be between 10,000 to 20,000 topics an hour depending on a variety of things. One things for sure now that we've finally redesigned the database we won't have to do this again. From here on out we'll be able to do just normal database updates.

LOL - I will have to do it again, when I go live I have to blend the other pages with my test forums - then copy them over to the existing forum location.