Topic prune tips please

[fineline]

For reasons I won't bother you with, we have a very large database with 100,000 topics and well over a million posts. Can't really see any benefit in that and presumably makes the CPU work harder during searches.

I found that using the topic prune takes an age, about 1 sec per topic. I zapped just 2000 topics last week and took over 30mins so to half our db would probably take around 14 hours at best. Was wondering what others have found the optimum number of posts per cycle was, I used 50, and could keeping the forums running during a prune cause any problems?

Would it make sense to start the prune at say midnight when traffic is light, go to bed and forget it? What's the best way to approach optimising the db afterwards which after just zapping 2000 topics took a long time? A little at a time or wait till after the full prune and do it all at once?

We're still running 2.1.7 on a dual Xeon 5100 dedicated. Most of the day we have 300-350 online within 15 mins making a couple of thousand posts a day. Thanks for your thoughts. :)

[AndyF]

Topic moved to "Server Management, Resources, Optimization" :)

[bfarber]

I'd say if you really want to prune, just setup the tool and let it run.

Afterwards you can optimize the posts and topics tables from the command line (you wouldn't want to do that on a million-post posts table via phpmyadmin, etc.).

Also, for searches, you should look into Sphinx - provides much better performance for searching. There's a modification for it on resources.invisionpower.com