Will, as long as we can keep and review the content somewhere else at a later date I am OK with this. I don’t want to just trash it. At some point we may have the resources to review it and edit it and re-purpose some of it.

I doubt any of the content is pertinent, but if it’s not much trouble to store it offline that would be ideal so I can go through it later. Also, it appears that most of the replies to the older forum posts were lost during our first migration which would make much of that content pointless.

What you described works fine for me, Will. Airlines, hostels, bus lines, rail routes, pricing, timetables, procedures, etc. etc. can and do change, and I think 5 years is reasonable to keep a depth of content, yet remove forgotten and (likely) no longer relevant info. I say go for it.

Personally I don’t think it will speed up the site. Notice how fast your computer pulls up a google search with all the data that has to be sorted through. Eurotrip only has to search through some text files. There will be no increase in speed by deleting the posts.

The problem is something that is fixable without deleting data. (I’m not aware of other forums deleting data and they work fine.) I’d like to see the actual problem fixed.

The problem started shortly after the upgrade in January 2007. The site worked fine until then. It wasn’t a gradual change either. It happened one day and hasn’t been fixed yet.

Swill, if you can research some of the “Pubs” posts you may be able to find something. I seem to remember people posting about the slowdown. There maybe some office records that showed what changes were made too.

I’d rather the posts were left alone as I don’t think deleting will help at all.

As a matter of fact, I remember my old company deleting everything that was over a year and a half old. There was no change at all in the speed of accessing data. (The deleting was done to recover some storage space.)

Is Eurotrip set at a low priority?

mb, i respectfully disagree with your points. one of the main reasons for the slow speeds is the size of the eurotrip database and the way in which permissions are allocated to users. since eurotrip is now much more than just the forums, there is overhead for that increase in functionality. i am working on reducing this overhead, but the time i can allocate to increasing the speed has been limited.

there is no data stored in text files, no one does that anymore. it is all database driven. if we were using a ‘normal forum’ we would not be able to build functionality like the Trip Planner and hook into booking api’s to offer hostel bookings inline. the list goes on… i agree that we need to address the speed of the site (mainly the forum front page) and i think this will help a lot due to the queries that are being run.

I’d be happy with the 5 years.

BTW, the site is significantly faster for me now — less than 20 seconds for things that used to take nearly a minute.

Will, I wouldn’t mind too much purging the old content (posts that are older than 5 years old and do not have any comments) but I would really really like not to do it. anyway is much better now than it was about 8 months ago, when I came back to EuroTrip after a long absence ! The 10 – 15 seconds I have to wait for a message to be posted is not so disturbing anyway, I mean the forum is usable.

With all respect, Will, I’m not convinced the problem cannot be solved without purging database. Maybe some further fine-tuning of the DB would do it (for example the waiting time when someone answers a topic lead me to the idea that an index is recreated each time a post is inserted). Would you please let us know how many posts are there in total, out of which how many are older than 5 years old and how many will be deleted ?

One idea would be to keep the old posts in another DB, as an archive, so people can search in the archive, if they want (but the normal search will go on the new posts)

all best,
Radu

@radu: There are over 100,000 posts in the forum and there are way more comments than that. I have been tweaking the database a lot in the past month or so. You will notice that the site is quite fast other than the front page of the forum. With my database tweaks, I have been able to speed up the front page of the forum from 24 seconds to 14 seconds (testing from my machine). The reason for the slow forum front page is actually from the access rights and the counts. The problem is that when you load the front page of the forum it goes through all of the posts and checks if you have access rights and then if there is new comments in order to display what is new for each user. Users who are not logged in will have the forum front page load much faster because we can cache the data for them.

I like the secondary database idea. For example, when someone performs a search there could be a checkbox asking if the uses wants to check the secondary database as well.

My computer just bit the dust, so it is going to take me a week or so to get to this.

I think that everyone has good points in this thread, so I will try to implement this…

Hmm, I am sort of on the fence about this.
As Oldlady says, the connection time for me has already really improved. I also agree with Don about how so much information becomes outdated.
Nevertheless, I have a fond affection for certain threads, such as A Girl’s Guide to Glamour While Traveling, which is 10 years old, and comes up #1 on a Google search.

Or maybe have a checkbox for every category you want to search:

video
posts
archives
whatever

Threads like “Girl’s Guide to Glamour” would be unaffected because it actually has comments (and even has comments in the past 4 years). Most of the “old but good” threads are still somewhat active, so they would not get cleaned. The only threads that would get cleaned would be ones that have been entirely inactive for over 4 years.

Ya that would be a good idea. I will have to look into seeing if that is possible…