IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING PMs!

Renegade 13 · #1 July 15th, 2008, 04:09 PM

62 in my inbox, 2 in outbox...

The oldest from May of 2004... ok it may not be over 100, but most of these can go!

Atrocities · #2 July 15th, 2008, 04:28 PM

I cleared my PM bank. sorry about not doing that sooner, I didn't realize that I had over 200. Yikes!

Mindi · #3 July 15th, 2008, 04:29 PM

LOL, well we're only cracking down on those with totals over 100, but any messages you can get rid of will speed up the final import, which means less down time......so by all means purge whatever you don't want!

Ed Kolis · #4 July 15th, 2008, 05:24 PM

91 in, 6 out... phew, just made it!

Though I suppose I should start deleting some in case someone decides to send me four more! Some of my PM's date back to 2003

Out of curiousity, what forum software are you upgrading to? A new version of UBB, or Something Completely Different? And what's happening to the rest of the site?

edit: P.S. in the new site, are the Shrapnel logos on the page header going to be links back to the main site? That would be handy...

Mindi · #5 July 15th, 2008, 07:54 PM

Going to something completely different. UBB has been going downhill for years now and parts of our version are just plain broken and it's not even worth upgrading to stay on software that is behind the times. We're moving to what is basically the standard among forum software right now which is vbulletin. I know I will hear some ahem complaining (to put it nicely) about the change in software as I know there are some who love phpbb since it's a free product and feel we should move to that, but we went with what we felt will offer us the most as far as flexibility, support and active modding community.

This should bring a lot of cool changes for the users and for the company. The whole site is getting a redesign as well courtesy of Tim. In addition, press releases are being 'automated' to a certain extent so that the news page is not being manually updated (you may have already noticed the new press release forums I have been putting up recently).

The only thing staying the same is the store.

Fyron · #6 July 15th, 2008, 08:38 PM

So long as it isn't UBB, we are happy.

Ed Kolis · #7 July 15th, 2008, 08:48 PM

But Fyron, how are you ever going to get to 18,494 posts again?

Mindi · #8 July 15th, 2008, 08:55 PM

We haven't seen any issues with post counts during the import.

douglas · #9 July 17th, 2008, 03:39 PM

I notice you mentioned in the Dom 3 forum that about 100000 PMs were taking longer than everything else put together. Considering there are over 5 times that many posts alone, plus the user list and various other data on top of that, I can't think of any reasonable explanation for it other than an index or constraint requiring excessive redundant checking.

My first guess would be that the PM content column has a unique constraint but no index, which would force a string comparison of each and every PM with each and every other PM. This isn't that big a deal in normal use when you only have to worry about one new PM at a time, but doing 100k at once takes forever. Removing the constraint in this case would drop the import time immensely. Creating an index for it instead would greatly reduce the number of comparisons required, but the index itself would take some extra resources to maintain. Assuming my guess is correct, I would first try creating an index for the column and see how much that helps. If it still takes too long, then remove the constraint entirely before importing and then see if it can be added back in a reasonable amount of time.

Edit: Then again, I don't know that much about how most databases handle indexes on strings specifically, so it's possible that it does have an index on PM content and that removing that index could help. I doubt this is the case, but it might be possible.

Mindi · #10 July 17th, 2008, 04:57 PM

Like I said, I don't know all the finer points of this sort of thing. I do know what Richard did to speed up the main part of the import was to take off the indexing, but I don't think the PMs work the same way and we still haven't figured out what the total time will be once we put the index back on at the end because we haven't had a complete, successful import to try it on yet since the PM part failed last time.

I don't really like talking about all of this because it's not my area of expertise and I only know a little bit about everything Richard is doing. He's the back end, I'm the one putting in modifications, tweaking settings, importing smilies, etc.