I used to go and periodically delete all of the message threads that hadn't gotten any traffic for more than 60 days. I hadn't done this since last December, and I was kind of interested to see just how big a forum could get before UBB starting having problems.

UBB uses flat files to store all of it's message and user data. This works fine for small sets of data, but it doesn't scale well. As more and more messages are added, performance gets worse and worse until things start randomly breaking.

As of this morning the forums had messages going back to last October. They were getting quite large -- too large for UBB to handle, in fact. I've heard some complaints over the last week about problems posting messages, problems viewing topics, etc. So I think I've found the breaking point for UBB -- about 10 months of data on this system and it starts dying. (Other UBB systems with less traffic can store messages for a lot longer because they don't have as many messages.)

So I went and trimmed forums down to a reasonable level -- any topics that have been inactive for more than 60 days have been purged off the system, message areas have all been rebuilt, and everything has been reindexed. Performance should be reasonable once more, and forums and topics should no longer lock up on you.

I've noticed similar phenomenons on many UBB boards actually. If the forums aren't pruned for quite a long time, random errors - most of which are avoidable and tolerable, but not fixable - begin to occur here and there.

I guess the staff on TOTSE has no choice but to periodicly delete inactive posts for this may lead to further inconvencience for the rest of the board (bored?) users.


[This message has been edited by hp (edited 08-13-2002).]

It's nice to know not only that the problem has been fixed, but why it existed.

Thanks for the heads up.

hmmmm do you know by an estimate how much data that is like in gigs or something

Yeah, just keep trimming them down.

Anyone know a good Forum, like EZ Board, or is there a better one?

Thanks,

UBB, Ikonboard, Schnitz, phpbbs, yabb... the list goes on.