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The Database


peasepud
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the database that runs this site is getting dangerously large and shortly we will need to look at moving hosts to one that can accomodate us (to give you an idea of the problem this site uses over 95% of all the resources the sites I have on my hosting use).

 

I need to carry out urgent work on it and drop some lesser functions and stuff down. One of the things we'll need to do at least in short term is kill off stuff from the database. This includes members and threads.

 

So far Ive killed off well over 1000 members by simply removing anyone who had no posts and hadnt logged on for over two years.

What Im now looking to do now is reduce things further with the following.

 

Reduce the allowable size of inboxes from 50 to 10 items. Unless people can come up with a good enough reasoning for needing to keep more than 10 at a time? This will mean that I'll be running a script to kill off all the additional PMs at some time soon, it would be handy though if everyone can have a nip in and delete those you dont want beforehand.

 

Im thinking of killing off any thread that had less than two replies and was over 2 years old, we would prefer not to lose threads and posts but at the same time. If you made a thread 3 years ago and nobody replied or all you got was a single :lol: then it couldnt really have been much cop could it and therefore nobody is likely to go hunting for it.

 

These are the sort of things Im talking about. Pick any of these and stick it after http://www.toontastic.net/board/index.php?showtopic= to see what I mean 15693, 15684, 15615, 15659, 90, 15641, 15646, 15634, 15648, 15711, 15710, 182, 15628, 15611, 15701, 254, 268, 290, 317, 323, 325, 358, 395, 15609, 406, 405, 447, 455, 944, 488

 

If there are any SQL geniuses out there I would really like to come up with a script that removes excess quotes, those threads where people quote a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote and follow it with a :icon_lol: those posts use a huge amount of space. What Id like to do is kill off all but the last 2 or 3 quotes in the post. I know I'll need Regular expressions but its losing me big time.

 

If theres any other ideas? automatic ban for the first to say "delete all of x's posts".

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I would suggest killing off everything in the you tube and funny picture threads over 6 months old.

 

If we want to see these again we can locate them just as easily on you tube and google and I would have thought both of these threads use a lot of space.

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Does this explain why the board has been running slowly and tripping up quite a bit recently?

 

Also I have noticed some of the content from my more recent PMs has deleted itself which is a shame as these were actually quite important. Fortunately I had made copies. Don't suppose there is any way of exporting PMs more than one at a time? I'm a bit of a hoarder and don't like deleting correspondence, I have tens of thousands of emails going back ten years saved so I always thought having just 50 PMs was tight anyway. Does it really make that much difference to the database size?

 

I think it's been said before but a lot of people would be prepared to contribute if a bigger server is required. I realise this would be a nightmare to administrate though. I can also think of some members worthy of deletion if that helps. :lol:

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Another measure we've taken, and you may have noticed already, is that we've reduced the amount of embedded quotes in a post that are permitted going forward.

 

It was set at 50 which was ridiculous. IPB standard is 10 and even that is too high particularly when you consider how daft some of them can get so we've reduced it to 5.

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I'm very surprised you have a bottle neck on space. I would move to another host. Disk cost drops all the time so your host might be willing to give you more to stop you leaving.

 

If you want to stay where you are, you could always archive everything pre 2009 to archive.toontastic.net to a cheap host. As it's only an archive, it can be cheap as chips.

Edited by Phil
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Also I have noticed some of the content from my more recent PMs has deleted itself which is a shame as these were actually quite important.

 

Just gone to delete some of my PM's to find that all of their content has disappeared :lol:

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re. Quoteathon posts and the 'failed' post ( two or fewer replys), I'm an utter luddite when it comes to the technical stuff you're talking about, but if you gave me some parameters and a specific date period , I'll be happy to search that period and flag any post that fall under the parameters- e.g. I'll search July 2008 for the above mentioned kind of posts, log the post\thread # and send the list to admins to delete or not.

If a few other posters were willing to do the same, would that help?

 

I know most of us work, but if we all did a little it would take the burden from admin and maybe help sort the problem?

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Should have the quotes thing reduced even further, maybe 2. No need to go that far back especially on here where I see people always quoting whole articles or posts to comment on them when it's the opening post of the topic (therefore what the topic is all about!) or even the post just above theirs (takes on silly proportions when it's two people having a back and forth).

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Also I have noticed some of the content from my more recent PMs has deleted itself which is a shame as these were actually quite important.

 

Just gone to delete some of my PM's to find that all of their content has disappeared :lol:

 

You're not the only ones, it's happened to me too. Have asked Pud if he'd done some additional purging but he says not. Database has been unstable as we all know so it's not implausible to consider that they table may well be corrupted.

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Does it make a difference if you have 1000 topics of one post each or a single topic with 1000 posts.

 

I assume it does.. Coulkd do with merging a load of threads if so.

 

Search on twitter in the topic and you get 6 or so threads.

 

Searches on other keywords would get the same results i reckon.

 

Facebook, muslim, ashley, shepherd etc.

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re. Quoteathon posts and the 'failed' post ( two or fewer replys), I'm an utter luddite when it comes to the technical stuff you're talking about, but if you gave me some parameters and a specific date period , I'll be happy to search that period and flag any post that fall under the parameters- e.g. I'll search July 2008 for the above mentioned kind of posts, log the post\thread # and send the list to admins to delete or not.

If a few other posters were willing to do the same, would that help?

 

I know most of us work, but if we all did a little it would take the burden from admin and maybe help sort the problem?

 

Ask not what the database can do for you, but what you can do for the database.

 

I get errors when quoting nested posts now, rather than it just removing the earlier posts. A bit annoying.

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Can't believe all the quoting going on in this thread of all places

 

I say Remove the quote function altogether.

 

People can copy/paste/indent/italicise anything that it's particularly important to refer back to.

 

:lol:

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Does the arcade use up much space?

I'm sure a few of the games on there could be ditched.

What is this arcade you speak of?

Theres a link to it at the very top right, but it doesn't seem to be loading so it might have been scrapped.

There was/is a fuckton of shitty flash games on there, with board high scores.

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