Downtime today for pruning [complete]

AntonyF

Official Tahmoh Taster
Rear Admiral
Apologies for the 6.5 hours of downtime today. This was required to prune some posts from the Trek BBS.

I said back in December I would chop some data from the system... for stability mostly. However the issue became more prominent as we were running out of disk space.

We weren't 'out' as such, but the database system requires extra space when backing up in the morning for example (which was when we were running out). Disk space running out on the server is problematic because all the sites will stop working properly, email will stop working etc. The disk space issue was even a problem when finalising maintenance today.

However, in line with the announcement back then TNZ has felt the brunt of the post cull. 484,918 posts have been deleted with 9055 threads (a bit less than the estimated 500,000). The thread had to be at least 765 days old, with no reply for at least 365 days; so these really were quiet old threads, and shows you how with no culls now for three years how things build up. TNZ is left with about ~8500 threads... the total on the front page is wrong, it seems.

It represents approximately 10% of the Trek BBS database, and saves us a pretty measly 280 MiB which (I don't understand this MiB crap) is somewhere around 300MB I guess? But that is shaven off the database, and makes backups more lean.

There will be a further cull, either on Sunday or in a week or two's time, but it won't be quite as severe. It will also follow the previous announcement in terms of where things are cut.

Thanks for your patience.
 
Re: Downtime today for pruning

I have now done the second and final phase.

Thanks again for your patience. We haven't pruned in three years, and it's required about 11 hours of downtime in total, but it puts us in good stead now.

The following have been chopped:

4,178 threads of 175,869 posts from Misc.

4,804 threads with 138,591 psots from Sci-fi.

1,577 threads with 44757 posts from TV and media.

In most cases the threads hadn't been posted or updated in two - three years.

That brings to a close the pruning... we've gone from 4,153,211 total posts to 3,308,537.. and while i don't like deleting stuff, this has been done without loss of anything remotely recent. It should make things a bit more nippy, and will help with our migration to XenForo.

This cull, and a move to better systems soon, means prunes should remain an event every few years rather than every few months like the days of old!
 
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