Clean a OLD Database and Cluster Setup

[Gustavo Pereira]

Hello,

I have one ipb forum with more than 8 years old, it has about 1,5M posts. I would like

to know what's the better way to clean this database? (delete old topics, posts etc...)

Another question, IPB can run in cluster with load balancer?

Thank you all,

Gustavo

[Grumpy]

If you want to manage old posts, you should turn on archiving option in ACP. It won't delete them, but put them in a separate table and make them uneditable and save resources.

I think there was also prune option somewhere in the acp... But generally speaking, I wouldn't advise it since I'll kill some of your inbound traffic.

If you setup good caching, I found IPB's mysql requirements to be actually low that I've never seen the need to create any kind of mysql cluster. Given my current setup and expectations, I think I'll have to reach ~30m pageviews/day to start making changes. And even then, I'd likely upgrade my DB server hardware rather than start mysql clustering (because that's messy). Going beyond 100m /day, I would probably be forced to mysql cluster. But I guess that'd be a happy problem as I'm reaching the traffic of world top 100 sites. lol

But IPB is fairly heavy in PHP, ie processing. So, you will need to create a cluster of PHP servers if you get CPU bound. Yes, it can run with load balancer. And luckily, horizontally expanding PHP is much easier. But be sure to watch your internal network limits between things like memcache/mysql/etc as they will have very high bandwidth usage and some changes may be required due to it.

Lastly, given 1.5M posts over 8 years, I would think it would fit in a single dedi server without much issues under a typical high perf setup (ie. ssd for db, op cache, user cache, no apache).

[Rhett]

1.5 mil post is tiny in reality these days, it will run fine on a single server setup properly and on our hosting as well. If you need a hosting provider for this, submit a ticket and we can review your options and what plan would suit you best.

[Adika]

I have over 5 million posts and didn't realize the archiving option was available. I'm currently archiving old posts. I read that the archived posts can be stored on a separate server to free up space and optimize the board's operation. What is the name of the table of archived topics that would need to be stored on a different server?

[ASTRAPI]

Hi Adika

1.5 mil post is not alot at all.....if you need better performance just get a better server or optimize your existing server and in your case there is no need to use a cluster for performance only as it will help most with High Availability but if you want it for another reason then ...

Yes you can run the database in a cluster environment without any problems but you will need 3 database servers and one for HA Proxy....

I have done already this for a customer and is working great using MariaDB cluster

Also you must use the same datacenter and get high speed internal network to avoid any issues....

[Adika]

What is the most efficient way to delete old threads to free up the size of the database? Let's just say I want to delete all threads older than 3 years. What's the best way to simply do that?

[ASTRAPI]

Please check this free hook:

[Adika]

Thanks. I'm having trouble installing this hook. I don't see the XML file after downloading. Also, I'm using cPanel Accelerated 2 and the install instructions for the hook don't seem to correlate with cPanel's layout

[ASTRAPI]

It is on the zip file :)

Just send me a pm if you want to help you install it :)