Fastest Way to Prune?
 

I have a extremely large forum, the load time for forums and posts are extremely long, even with my rather robust server. Currently our database is around 11GB. Due to the large amount of posts, when attempting to load any forum or post, the time has drastically descreased. I am currently trying to prune around 4million posts. How ever, even with my rather robust server, the pruning time is dire slow. It has taken me about 6 days to delete 100,000 posts. At this rate I won't be be done for years.

Is there any way to prune at a faster rate? Possibly setting limits so only a certain amount of posts are pruned? Currently when I run it, it attempts to prune 2.8 million posts. Perhaps that is why? I dunno, either way. I need to find a fast way to prune this quickly?

Sorry, no answer for you, but just another gripe that we still have no way to offload when pruning. We need an option other than delete.

But I suspect some will tell you that old posts in the db isn't what's slowing you down. People only see one screen's worth when they browse; it's not like they have to retrieve all 10,000 posts that went prior.

I've heard that the size of the db isn't what is slowing every thing down, but my stats show otherwise.

When my forums don't have all the posts to go through, it loads quickly, when it has the 11gb db, the load time is minutes. If I put it completely online for all to see, it crashes the server every time. There are normally around 200-400 people on the forums. How ever, now, even when there is only 30 the forums load time drops by minutes.

Are you trying to prune using the Admin CP > Threads & Posts > Prune? Can you change the criteria in there to prune less than all the posts you want to prune. For instance, if you want to prune all posts older than 3 years old, start by pruning the ones older than 4 years old (or something like that), then 3.9 years old, then 3.8 years old, etc.

Question: Is there a way to prune threads without losing the member's post count?

Once you prune it the members post count from before the posts and threads were pruned will still be viewable...but if you update the post count for members via admin cp it will become for how ever much you lost when doing the prune.

So if you had 5000 posts and it got pruned it will still be viewable.

Once you update the post count via admin cp then it will say 0