Our Forum is Excruciatingly Slow

[MIchael R.]

Our forum is so slow now that it won't load. It freezes and crashes our browsers.

http://www.medisherpa.com/community

How can we address this issue?

 

[yavuz]

It maybe releated to the enormous amount of subforums, I could be mistaken of course. I would suggest using thread prefixes to avoid open so much sub forums.

 

[Ingenious]

What's New and selected threads load very quickly. It's something on your home page and I agree with yavuz, it looks like your number of sub-forums. I mean forum-wide you have 166 threads spread across 9000+ subforums, that's crazy. Why not have just one single EU, USA and Canada forum, then split them down IF they get busy?

I'd suggest you temporarily remove the above three forums from view (in the admin section) then see if the home page loads OK.

 

[Russ]

9000+

 

[mrGTB]

That can't be right, I don't even see any sub-forums listed at all there.

Ops! I see them now, was looking for the drop-down list on forumhome

 

[Russ]

That can't be right, I don't even see any sub-forums listed at all there.

I think he edited out the template to hide them on the home page.

 

[yavuz]

No logged in user, 7 visitors still very slow. I imagine it will almost unbearable when people want to post & upload things. With this number of subforums it's better to have a VDS or dedicated server if you are not already on one.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Don't know if you fixed it, but I just tried the forum and, assuming you're in a shared environment, it really wasn't bad. The home page, forums and messages seemed to load all right.

 

[Digital Doctor]

That's one weird site.

 

[DBA]

Wow, my small town of 10k (including rural residents) has it's own subforum, I feel special.

I believe that this says it all.


Here's how I would've set it up:

• Talk About Anything
• Health News
• Drug Reviews (with all drugs listed as prefixes)
• Procedures (with all broad procedures (Oncology, Fertility, Dental, Cardiology, Cosmetic, etc) listed as prefixes)
• Country Forums (List countries as prefixes or at the most, sub-forums)

5 forums vs the I-lost-track-at-8,567 forums you currently have.
Prefixes are a great resource to utilize. For example we used to have an Injured and Fallen subforum inside our Rider Down forum. But after switching to XF early this year, I went on a cleaning/organizing spree. We now use Injured and Fallen prefixes as it organizes stuff better.

And after clicking on the "Fallen" prefix, it'll only show those threads.

This is just one of many places that we utilize prefixes in, a few others would be our Regional and bike forums.

 

[MIchael R.]

Thanks for all the comments, ok we are not in a shared environment. We are currently experimenting with different things we tweaked the code in 'node_forum_level_2' to not render a dropdown for 'renderedChildren'.

 

[MIchael R.]

We now also have info about page load time at the very bottom of the page.

 

[MIchael R.]

That's one weird site.

What's so weird about it?

 

[Adam Howard]

9000 forums?!?

nginx
php-fpm
Percona MySQL

And RAM .... Lots of it. CPU is always a plus, but for you... RAM

 

[Digital Doctor]

Too many forums ?

 

[Ghan_04]

I've had experience with a Xenforo install with over 5000 forums, and it was not pretty. I cannot imagine having over 9000.... How many hours does it take to load your node tree?

 

[MIchael R.]

Ok let me shed some light on why we chose to do it this way, and please enlighten us if you think we are going down the wrong path. I'm still a bit confused as to what these prefixes actually do. My partner comes from TripAdvisor and the reason we chose to setup our forum the way we have is because we are replicating the model used by them to maximize indexed pages and seo keyword searches: http://www.tripadvisor.ca/ListForums-g191-United_States.html if you go into a forum and click on "Jump to a more specific forum:" you will see all the sub-forums.

So the issue here is too many sub-forums, is that correct?

 

[simbolo]

The issue is most likely with the number of sub forums. There's a lot of permission calculations that go in to rendering those nodes. See Jakes post.

 

[Ghan_04]

Ok, I think I get what you're trying to do. Yeah, prefixes would work a lot better here. I would have, using this example, a real Xenforo forum for each state and a prefix for each city that you need. It would get to be a lot of prefixes, but I think a large number of prefixes is much preferred to a large number of forums.
Then when you click a prefix the forum is filtered by that so you only see the results you want.

 

[DBA]

So the issue here is too many sub-forums, is that correct?

Yes.

My partner comes from TripAdvisor and the reason we chose to setup our forum the way we have is because we are replicating the model used by them to maximize indexed pages and seo keyword searches: http://www.tripadvisor.ca/ListForums-g191-United_States.html if you go into a forum and click on "Jump to a more specific forum:" you will see all the sub-forums.

Not entirely sure how subforums will help you with SEO. Subforum names aren't referenced in the title or url of threads. Prefixes on the other hand are referenced in the thread title, which means they'll show up in Google searches.





SEO and other stuff aside, look at it from your users point-of-view. 9000+ forums with only a couple posts in them look dead, I'd be moving on. Instead if you have a few forums that extensively use prefixes, it makes the forums more active and you can still drill down by using a prefix (if needed).