PM Issues and Planned Solution

[Christopher Fritz]

As I'm sure everyone knows, Dolly Market has been slow with Private Messages for many months now. Off and on I've tried many different things to try and get the forums to be stable, but recently they've become very unstable. The result is that the web server uses too much memory and crashes. This can take anywhere from an hour to as little as two minutes from my restarting the server to it crashing.

I've done thorough investigating today. In testing on a clone of the forums, I was able to reproduce the problem of the PM system being slow, using a lot of memory, and PMs taking forever to send. I was also able to get the PM system to run very fast and efficient.

At this time, it looks like the problem is that the server cannot handle all the PMs we have. The system has 168,501 PMs from before January 1st, 2012. To compare, Dolly Market only has 123,313 posts, across 14,253 threads.

My solution in testing was to delete all PMs from before January 1st, 2012, and that fixed all speed the issues. I don't think I need to prune quite that many to get results in the live environment.

Last year we reached a PM limit where the server would slow down when many people would access their PMs. As the number of PMs has increased, we've slowly reached a point where a couple of people sending PMs cause the server to literally commit digital suicide.

We are now at a point where it will be a requirement to delete older PMs. My first and foremost priority is to ensure anyone who wants to retain their oldest PMs will have access to them. The forum software does have a feature to download PMs, but using this feature might be difficult if the web server keeps going down under the weight of all the PMs, especially if many people try to save their PMs all at once, and act that will certainly take the server down in seconds.

I'm eloring options for handling this issue. My current thought is to start by deleting the oldest year of PMs, and and see if the PM system is still slow. If so, I can delete the next oldest, and check again. Any deleted PMs will first be copied to a back-up location in case they need to be recovered again.

Update: The server wasn't doing well with the PM slowness, so I've gone ahead and wiped out all PMs prior to January 1st, 2011.

If you absolutely need any of your older PMs back, let me know, and I get send you an eort of your PMs. Note that I may not be able to do so in a timely fashion, but I will be able to recover those older PMs if necessary.