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Joined: May 2007
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journeyman
journeyman
Joined: May 2007
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We're nearing 1 million posts, and I'd like to check out other high post count boards.

Do you prune non-active members regularly? Does the member count continue to accumulate when you do?

Just curious on how we can optimize things on our boards without losing posts.


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R
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There are a couple I know of that have a couple million posts and don't prune anything. As numbers grow, it really comes down to your server specs and it being optimized properly, specifically MySQL.

If you have your own server then that's the first thing I'd look at is making sure that MySQL is optimized for your particular server specs. A poorly or untuned MySQL install won't keep up as your numbers continue to grow.

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We have around 1.75 million posts - I have culled a few members (not posts) to free up a few user / display names that have never been used.

Most of these are 5 - 9 years old, so not too much harm.


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journeyman
journeyman
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Ian,

Do you have the new post notifications numbers turned on? We've turned ours off and things are running smoothly, but our members are revolting and not happy at all! They really miss this feature.


Cara-
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Here is where I am at:

Quote
Board Statistics
Version: 7.2.2
Total Members: 15014
New in past 24 hours: 0
New in past 7 days: 23
New in past month: 219
Total Forums: 55
Total Topics: 122444
Total Posts: 1766287

I haven't pruned in a couple of years, probably. I have the new post numbers turned on.


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Originally Posted by ladybug_mom
Ian,

Do you have the new post notifications numbers turned on? We've turned ours off and things are running smoothly, but our members are revolting and not happy at all! They really miss this feature.


Turned ours off now - slowed things up too much.

no easy solution I fear....

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Joined: Dec 2003
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I don't get it Ian.
When you say slowed things down. Do you mean visitors?
Disabling the feature should speed up the board response.


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no the forum speed smile

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Hum,
Very interesting!


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SD Offline
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i worked with simHQ (over 2.5 million posts) -- the solution was to just create an archive DB for the 'historical posts'... then allow the 'current posts' which are highly trafficked be part of the primary DB...

works fine and makes speed a non-issue.. smile

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I tried turning the numbers off, and it made no noticeable difference in speed. Everyone noticed that the numbers were gone, however, and I got a ton of complaints!

Here are my server specs (dedicated):

dell PowerEdge R200
Dual-core Xeon 3060
4096 MB Memory
160 GB x2 SATA RAID 1

I have never optimized anything, but the host may have.






Steve

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Expensive but RAID 10 is much faster and more redundant.

There is also some documentation on how/what Wikipedia has done which is also using a MySQL DB and they have multiple millions of hits daily on their DBs - they have more than one and do mirroring and other more advanced methods.

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Originally Posted by SteveS
dell PowerEdge R200
Dual-core Xeon 3060
4096 MB Memory
160 GB x2 SATA RAID 1

I have never optimized anything, but the host may have.

You're probably suffering from a untuned MySQL Installation. Sounds like you're on a dedicated server, and in every case I've seen the MySQL config is the default configuration.

You're probably going to see immediate improvements if you spend some time tuning MySQL. I'd recommend using http://wiki.mysqltuner.com/MySQLTuner]MySQLTuner or hiring someone to tune it for you.

If you do it yourself, run it the first time, adjust some of the variables as noted and then restart MySQL. Let it run for 24 hours or so and then run it again. Adjust the variables as noted and repeat.

It will take some time, but when finished you'll have a pretty good configuration running. Beyond that it really takes understanding the variables and statistics to tune any further.

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I might not have been clear - my site is running fine. I tried shutting off the new post counters just to see if there was an impact, and there wasn't. Regardless, I'm sure it's worth tweaking, and I'll give it a shot. You are correct that it is a dedicated server (through Hostway), and I have no doubt that it is in the default configuration.


Steve

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