Is There A Performance Impact With Followed Content Settings

[Joy Rex]

If I were to set the Remove Followers from uncommented content to "Never" (which I assume would mean it would NEVER remove followers from uncommented content), would there be any performance impact on the forum?

[bfarber]

Over time, yes - the performance impact would depend upon the size of your site and how busy it is.

Say 10,000 people subscribe to be notified of a forum, but 8,000 of them haven't visited your site in 5 years (and have no intention of doing so). That's 8,000 emails your site is sending when someone posts a new topic in that forum, which is both taxing for your email server (and potentially costing you money if you pay for something like Sendgrid), as well as your webserver running the task that actually finds who to send the email to and builds those emails.

In short, it's logical to remove old content. It keeps your database size smaller which will only improve performance.

[Joy Rex]

5 hours ago, bfarber said:

Over time, yes - the performance impact would depend upon the size of your site and how busy it is.

Say 10,000 people subscribe to be notified of a forum, but 8,000 of them haven't visited your site in 5 years (and have no intention of doing so). That's 8,000 emails your site is sending when someone posts a new topic in that forum, which is both taxing for your email server (and potentially costing you money if you pay for something like Sendgrid), as well as your webserver running the task that actually finds who to send the email to and builds those emails.

In short, it's logical to remove old content. It keeps your database size smaller which will only improve performance.

Thanks - that makes sense, and now I have clear explanation to provide the user 😅