The Main Problem With Slowdowns

The main problem with the site slowdowns are large topics.

Monitoring the DB, the biggest culprit appears to be the New Purchases topic, I just locked it.

Please let's just everyone start your own new topic with each of your new purchases, it's much better that way anyway. You can put it in the correct forum with it's own descriptive title.

If monitoring reveals other major large topic culprits I may lock those also, so please don't think it's just me being a jerk.

Thanks, Bobby. We've needed that for quite awhile.

That's interesting,
I always assumed multiple threads would be the offender.

Large topics lock the DB tables while calculating paging.

Bobby. Not that I want you to change this, but I have noticed slowdowns also occur when I look at my account (or anyone else), and ask to "View Recent Posts". That must do a whole lot of searching, and I'm sure it slows down the system to a great degree.

Just my input.

Thanks for all of the great work.

Yes, I'm aware of that also. That seems to just slow the specific user down though, not everyone like the large topics, so not as important.

Which database platform is being used? Why would recalculating paging be required except after appending or updating or deleting a post?

Very sorry folks but I've had to temporarily remove the Collecting by Engraver topic. It's causing all kinds of slowdowns because it's so large. It's not deleted, once the DB is upgraded it will be restored.

Thanks Bobby, seems like an excellent idea.

Is it possible for the forum software to limit the maximum number of posts a thread can contain?

Sure, but it won't be an issue at all once we move the DB to MSSQL so I'd rather just temporarily disable the topics that are a problem. I'm hoping by the end of next month it will be done. It's not something I can do myself, I've saved the money to pay to have it done, just trying to coordinate with him when, he's very busy.

What DB are you on now?

Perhaps you could just open a new "latest purchases" every time you get beyond whatever page limit you think is efficient (named with an ascending or descending suffix to tell them apart - oldest from most recent). It is such a popular topic - prefer it not disappear.

As I said, it's only temporary.

But also let me ask you this.... How many stamps in those hundreds of pages do you think are worthy of their own topics? I'd bet a lot. I have the statistics on these kinds of "Show me...." topics and they royally suck. Once a page is done and a new one starts anything previous almost never gets seen again. Seriously, they are "lost."

The forum and it's education value would be MUCH better if every one of those stamps had it's own topic, with it's own relevant title, in it's own relevant forum. Much better.

I generally read posts beginning with the original question or comment so I can make sense of the discussion. But some posts like "Show me your . . . " posts aren't discussions, but just collections of images. So for those I'd be unlikely to do that. And I'd be especially unlikely to do that if the post was beyond a dozen or more pages. Who's got time for that amount of browsing?

Which makes me ask: Could there be some sort of programmed limit to the length of any post, so that once it hit, say, 10 pages, it automatically ended? It would be possible to make that ending show a comment like "If you're interested in continuing this discussion, you will need to begin a new post that refers to it." That would make all posts shorter, and you'd still allow continued images, comments, and so forth. Not sure if something like that is possible to design, though?