[katie hunter]

Originally Posted by DragonByte Tech

Yes I did. I've never denied that we've had complaints from large forums as a result of the alters on the "post" and "user" tables. Nobody has ever complained about a 6+ hour lock, that is an issue on your server and your server alone.

A large forum is going to complain if it takes more than 30 seconds to install (which is the timeout value of PHP scripts on most servers), unless their server is setup to allow for PHP scripts to extend their execution time infinitely.

Please stop arguing the point with people who know more about this than you.
I'm not saying this to be offensive, I wouldn't argue with a chemist about the effects of certain drugs just because I at one point read a Wikipedia page. I accept that this person is more knowledgeable than me in the field of chemistry.

Just for fun, I'm going to show you how fast our database server can run an alter on a DB table that has 9 million rows in it.
The specs of the DB server are as follows:
CPU: 3.3Ghz e3-1230-V2 Ivy Bridge with HT
RAM: 8GB DDR3
HDD: 60GB Intel Solid State Drive 520 Series
OS: CentOS 6.5 x64

MariaDB [finalfan_forum]> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbtech_vbactivity_pointslog;
+----------+
| COUNT(*) |
+----------+
|  9051708 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

As you can see, it has 9 million, 51 thousand, 7 hundred and 8 rows. This is approximately 6 times as many rows as you have in your "user" table.

A clean install of Advanced User Tagging (latest version at the time of writing) is going to run 9 alters in total against the "user" table (spread across 3 different installation steps). This modification does not alter the "post" table in any way, shape or form.

This is the result:

MariaDB [finalfan_forum]> ALTER TABLE dbtech_vbactivity_pointslog ADD testcolumn INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0';
Query OK, 9051708 rows affected (38.38 sec)            
Records: 9051708  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

In other words, 1 out of 9 alters takes 38.38 seconds on a machine that is empirically slower than yours.

Extrapolating this further, 9 out of 9 alters would take approximately 345.42 seconds, or 5.76 minutes.

What about uninstallation, you ask?

MariaDB [finalfan_forum]> ALTER TABLE dbtech_vbactivity_pointslog DROP testcolumn;                                     
Query OK, 9051708 rows affected (35.60 sec)            
Records: 9051708  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

1 out of 9 uninstallation steps takes 35.60 seconds.

Extrapolating this further, 9 out of 9 uninstallation steps would take 320.4 seconds or 5.34 minutes.

Even if we double, triple, quadruple, [...] the query time to account for the delay suffered when running this query via PHP as opposed to the command line, this does not come anywhere NEAR the 6+ hour time your server is experiencing.

The forum in question was http://www.finalfantasyforums.net/ which has over 1 million posts at the time of writing yet did not experience any issues when installing any of our modifications that make numerous alters to the "post" table.
(We host this forum, and the database server the forum runs on is the machine whose specs I listed above.)

I'm very much going to enjoy hearing your next round of excuses

Fillip

Who said excuses. I know what i encountered. You want to tell me that only your plugins are causing issues on my forum when install or uninstall and all the other plugins by other members doesn't have the same affect ? Because that is what i noticed and saw (only yours), that is why i said i never try to install any because of this issue, it is kinda scary actually not knowing when the task will be finished and to wait that long.

My server admin has access to this topic and there is a pending ticket, i am sure if he noticed something wrong, he will let me know.

Originally Posted by Tigga

I doubt many others make as many table alterations as his, simply because they're not necessary for that modification or because the author may not realize that altering a vB table would be better than trying to keep up with separate tables. I fully agree that it's best to avoid altering vB tables when you can, but it's often not the best practice if you want an add-on to run smoothly and without taking up any extra server resources. I'd much rather have it shut down my forum for 10 minutes during the install than to have it running extra queries during every page load after that. A 6 hour install time is obviously different, but apparently you're the only one that's experiencing times that are anywhere near that extreme, so I'd say it sounds more like DB has things balanced correctly and it's your server configuration that is suspect.

I always have my forum turned off when installing any plugin.