biggest vanilla install?

ithcy

i've just migrated a messageboard to vanilla with about 480,000 comments in about 27,500 discussions. so far it's running like a top. i'm wondering if anyone else has done something of this scale yet (maybe with the phpBB importer?) and, if so, if you've noticed any issues with vanilla scaling?

jonezy

omfg link?

ithcy

well... heh... it's a private forum. they would kill me.

i know, what a tease, right?

Mark

It is a little slower than it was before the import. I've definitely noticed a slight slowdown. But I guess that is to be expected. I suggested on your board that you turn off whispers and see if that makes a difference. I bet it will.

adrian.

google is going to love you.

ithcy

google is not allowed in either :)

ithcy

yeah nav, we'll see what killing whispers does. people love the whisper, though.

Mark

Another thing, vanilla comes with no special indexes on the tables (other than PK). I bet I could speed it up by adding a few.

ithcy

yeah.

i just can't wait until people start demanding the infamous "mark all as read" button. let's see, 200 users * 27500 threads... no.

Mark

hahaha - I know, right? I've been trying to think of a way to accomplish that "record the threads you read" feature without it getting ridiculous like that, but I just can't seem to come up with anything better (read: more efficient) than what I've already got.

ithcy

yeah, i've been thinking about it too... if i come up with any bright ideas i'll let you know

Mark

When talking about speeding up the discussion listing, here are a few indexes that might help things a bit. If I were you, I'd try them one at a time and see what difference it makes. That way we can nail down which ones really make a difference, and I can include them in the next release by default.

If they do make a difference, we'll move on to the comment page and see what we can do there:

CREATE INDEX IX_Discussion_AuthUserID ON LUM_Discussion (AuthUserID);
CREATE INDEX IX_Discussion_LastUserID ON LUM_Discussion (LastUserID);
CREATE INDEX IX_Discussion_WhisperUserID ON LUM_Discussion (WhisperUserID);
CREATE INDEX IX_Discussion_CategoryID ON LUM_Discussion (CategoryID);


Mark

Oh, and if you find that any of these slow things down (or they do nothing and you want to get rid of them), you can remove them like this:

DROP INDEX index_name ON LUM_Discussion;

where index_name is one of the IX_Discussion_* names I gave.

Mark

Oh, and it might help you to turn on the timer extension while testing this.

ithcy

"thanks dad"

i'll give it a shot now. do you want to come hang out and see how it goes?

Denied

nice work, other james.

ithcy

thank you sir
i couldn't have done it without you. *woinx

dknowles

Let us know which ones help, I'd like to add them on my board, too.

ithcy

i'm doing some informal benchmarking now. i'll post the results here.

Mark

Sorry - was working on something else. How did it go?

ithcy

not done yet... trying to get a good survey of typical activities and their timing before indexing

although at this stage it appears that turning on/off whispering has a negligible effect on most things. turning it off cuts down the render time for the "homepage", but nearly everything else (searches, etc) seems unaffected. i'll gather some more data, though.

Minisweeper

wait, when you say migrated did you mean with my migrator? just curious...

ithcy

no, i rolled my own :)

Minisweeper

ahh, fair enough, which forum were you moving from? I'm assuming from your comments vanilla is considerably quicker?

Mark

I would actually classify his version as pretty slow - but we've got some indexes on it now that are helping quite a bit. we'll post the results when finished.

Minisweeper

but if its slow is it still quicker than it was on the previous software?

Mark

Oh, I don't know. They've got whispers enabled, so that definitely slows things down on the discussion list. When they turned whispers off it sped up like nobody's business - but they really like whispers, so they turned it back on.

ithcy

right now it's slower than the old software, but there are a lot of other factors that have changed, so there can't be an apples:apples comaprison. the other software was a lot less feature-complex than vanilla and i think it was on a different host. what host did you use, denied?

Denied

the idea of tw with whispers makes my head feel funny. that's actually quite frightening...

and the old code was super lightweight, so vanilla probably won't ever get faster than it (based on a similar server set-up, that is. on a honking dedicated box, that's a different question). but i'm not giving up the old tw code, so they're shit outta luck!

but, really, it's better for them to be on vanilla.

Denied

tw was on dreamhost.

ithcy

that's where it is now.