Mass remove topics for better performance - bad idea ?

[FabioPaz]

Hello,

I have a forum with 170k+ topics and 2.200.000+ posts. Unfortunatelly, a lot of this content, over the years, became useless and I think this content only cluter the search, database and etc...

I was thinking if there's someway to safely mass remove topics that have ZERO activity in the last couple of years...

Someone done it ? What sql query did you use ?

Please, any help would be appreciated...

[Joel R]

Instead of deleting, you can also try:

1.  Moving them to separate forums and locking the topics

2.  Archiving them

 

But if you did want to remove:

1.  The delete should be fine.  I believe it's processed through a queue

2.  You may want to wait until 4.2.0 which offers delayed deletes, in case you wanted to undo some of your deletions.  

 

[SecondSight]

As for me, :

- I've removed about 2 million posts and I still have 4 million.

- I also removed 50 thousand accounts which had 0 posts. I still have 160 thousand accounts.

The problem is backing up the web site : it takes a long time with the database being 20 Gb big and the uploads directory being 32 Gb big. Also, I'm not sure the backup file is reliable...

[ASTRAPI]

Hello

Deleting data or archive them to have less data for backup or to make forum faster is not a good idea.

You must find out why the forum is not performing well and try to solve it...

Also in a few days/months you will be in the same position with many data.

It is better to solve the issue than hide it for a while...

In my opinion.

[SecondSight]

My server and community are doing fine. 🙂 I believe I can't trust the backup file of a 20 Gb database + a 32 Gb uploads directory. Am I wrong ?...

[ASTRAPI]

You must get backups.

If you do it correctly there should not be an issue the size.

I have backups with more than 100gb for the database and 4TB of files and both are working great when i restore them.