Strange Errors

Ok. :)

Version 8 will perform much faster than version 7, but it was never designed for a topic with 23,000 posts in it.

I wouldn't have even imagined that anyone would have had a topic with 23,000 posts in it, in a forum yes, but not in a single topic.

Version 8 has had many weeks spent optimising each SQL Query to get the maximum speed out of it for what it is used for, so forums are optimised to handle hundreds of thousands of posts, even millions, but the topics have only been optimised to handle upto hundreds of posts, as I have never herd of a topic with over a thousand posts, let alone 23,000

The forum could be optimised to handle 1000's of posts in topics, but this would be at a cost to slower performance on normal topics with upto 50 posts.


Edited by -boRg- - 23 September 2006 at 9:49pm

It maybe best if I explain how the optimisation works on the page displaying posts in version 8 compared to version 7.

In version 7 a couple of less complex SQL Queries were run on the database, then as each post is displayed 2 or 3 other queries were run to get additional data.

This means that for a topic with say 50 posts over 102+ database queries are run which eats up allot of server resources. Not very good as you would imagine.

In version 8 database hits are kept to a minimum, so for extra performance only 2 database queries are run for the page displaying the posts for the topic using more complex table joins to get all the required data and feeding it into an array.

As you can imagine 2 database hits for a topic no matter the number of posts is much better than over 100 for a 50 post topic and thus the page loads faster under normal circumstances, even if there are only 1 or 2 posts in the topic.

This is great till you get to a topic with 23,000 posts, table joins do place a bit more strain on the DBMS when you get to this type of level, as the DBMS needs to build up a table of the joined records, which is fine on normal topics, but having to build a table that uses complex joins for 23,000 records can place a tremendous strain on the database, thus getting the problems you mention.


Edited by -boRg- - 23 September 2006 at 10:16pm

It was an idea that one of our users suggested to control flood in the forum. We created a single topic within the whole forum in which the flood was permitted.

Edited by CinemaemCena - 23 September 2006 at 10:18pm