New Forum: GC's Most Popular Discussions
 

GC's Most Popular Discussions was added today as a new forum area on GC.

It was setup to serve a specific purpose.

Turns out that very long discussion threads are a bit of a problem for the software that GC is running on. Very long threads have been slow for a long while and it looks as though the longest threads are still going to be quite slow, at least for now.

Slight or moderate slowdown of threads seems to begin at right around the 1,000 post mark. And the longer they get the slower they become. It also has some negative impact on the rest of the site when many of those pages are being loaded.

This happens because of the way that the forum software is programmed as it is not optimized for the longest discussion threads.

I had a hunch earlier today that maybe there were a bunch of bots / web spiders / web scrapers loading those very long GC threads & causing much of the site slowdown. I suppose it likely was also some legit site visitors loading those super long pages as well. So I tested moving most of the longest threads into a private GCers only forum. That way at least the automated bots wouldn't be able to access those threads (unless they are logged in with activated accounts).

Anyhow, doing that seems to have helped a bunch with sitewide performance.

The new GC's Most Popular Discussions forum & threads within can only be accessed by GC members with activated accounts. Other site visitors & non logged in GCers, as well as bots / automated spiders will see some sort of access denied type page.

Anyone without a GC account who does want to be able to access that forum can join at http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/register.php (although there is a slight problem with that page which I'll post more about in another thread in the GreekChat forum).

The What do you feel like saying, right now? thread is still active. Although, I'm not sure it should be.

I think that would probably be a good idea. The "What do you feel like saying, right now?" thread has over 60,000 replies and is really slow.

Another forum software that I've been wanting to switch GC over to, Xenforo, is apparently very nicely optimized to handle the largest forum threads without too much trouble: https://xenforo.com/community/thread...hreads.217612/ Post #3 in that thread mentions Xenforo being able to easily handle millions of posts in a thread. By the way, the person posting that, "digitalpoint", owns one of the largest web publisher forums and is extremely familiar with the programming behind various forum systems.

So what I'm thinking regarding some of GC's most popular threads is that for now maybe we start new threads to continue the discussions there in smaller much faster threads. And once I have GC converted over to the Xenforo forum software we can consider reopening those super long threads. And, we can also even merge the new versions of those threads into the originals once the forum system here can handle it.

I think that thread is dead Lol. I tried to post twice on it, and my posts didn’t show up. Why is that?

GC is running much faster though. Thanks.

Did you get an error message or anything? Or did nothing happen after you clicked to post your message?

If nothing was happening, look at your browser tab to see if there's a small circle spinning. If so, that's the browser waiting for the page to process and return to you. Problem with it is that the thread is so large that it takes a while for the forum to process because of how this forum software is designed. It may seem like nothing is happening for a minute or two sometimes with the longer threads.

I think I'm going to close those really large threads but I'll split off a bunch of messages into new smaller threads with the same thread names.

When GC is on Xenforo I'll see about getting those big threads back up & merged with the new comments.

I didn’t get an error message. It actually posted. It allowed me to read what I posted, but once I went away from it to another thread, when I came back to it, it was gone. It only showed you as the last poster.

I see your message posted at the end of that thread. But also see it showing me as the last poster on the homepage link.

What I think happened is maybe the page process ended or was interrupted before updating the last post time. So it's still shows me as the last post, but you actually have the last post.

Just an odd error surely due to that thread being so huge. Probably a good idea that I remove them for a short while & return them later when the software stuff is sorted out.

Weird. Yeah, if that thread has the potential to slow things down, I think you should close it. We can start another one.

I think John should just dump all of those threads and start fresh. Just dump that whole link with all of those large threads in it.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/jInJJ...=200w.gif&ct=g

Lmao!! You stuuupid!

Nah, no reason to get rid of them. I'll get them sorted out tomorrow.

Thanks for the explanation, John. GC is running extremely fast this morning!

Getting "GC's Most Popular Discussions" threads away from the bots & spiders in that new private forum helped things out a lot. However, I noticed that those threads do impact the rest of the site as well even when only GCers are loading them.

So, for now, I'm removing those threads completely from view. They are not gone. What I'll be doing with a few of them soon is splitting those threads, so we will have new versions of those threads with the most recent messages posted. Maybe a dozen or so posts from each thread, or maybe anything from the past month will go into the new versions of those threads.

I hope to be moving GC's forum software to a different system sometime soon as well, Xenforo forum software. That software is supposedly optimized for being able to handle very long threads without issue. Once GC is running on that system I'll bring the super long threads back out for testing and if it all goes well will merge any posts from the new threads back into the original threads & we will go back to using the originals.

Yeah, it sure has sped up quite nicely! :)

Just in case anyone missed my update above ^ about the new subforum area:

(The post editing function isn't working so well right now so it was just faster for me to post this additional message.)

Hey John, I’m curious. Although we can’t view or post on those threads, do you think it’s possible that just the fact they’re still here, does that cause weight on the forum? Do they still impact the forum?

Probably will have barely any impact while stored away.

The main impact from the extremely long threads comes from this old forum software needing to do something with all 60,000+ posts (in the one general chat thread example), reading them & sorting them, just to display the last page which only has a few posts on it. Ideally the forum software would only read from the database what it needs to in order to build only the specific page that was requested, rather than reading everything in the entire thread.

You'll be able to view & post on the new much shorter versions of those threads today, I'll have them back up soon.