XF 1.5 Rebuilding permissions takes 10+ minutes

[ScarletCox]

Hi guys,

We have a head-scratcher. Whenever an admin creates a node, the rebuild takes over ten minutes. When they apply permissions to that node, rebuild takes over ten minutes. Installing or upgrading an addon can take over ten minutes. Basically whenever the permissions need rebuilding they take forever, and it can often mean that creating a new usergroup, adding users to that group, making a container and subfolders for that group, and then giving that group permissions to the container can take one of our staff well over three hours, and that's time they just don't have.

We have two themes installed: UI.X Dark and XenBase (Zipped) (in addition to the XF default). We have three children for UI.X and one for Zipped. Total number of templates is thus:

The forum itself zips along nicely. All other activity whizzes along. It's just this permissions rebuild that drags on way too long.

Any ideas what can be done to chivvy it along?

 

[Mike]

There's a lot of work done once when (potentially) necessary to ensure the forum itself zips along in normal use. So by that, some rebuild times are expected, though 10 minutes is fairly high.

When it comes to permissions, the time is mostly down to the number of permission combinations you have (distinct sets of user group membership or number of users with specific permissions) and the number of nodes (or other content that can have specific permissions). If you have a lot of either, that will mean more work. You can trigger a permission clean up under rebuild caches which will remove any unused permission combinations.

In terms of general rebuilding when it comes to add-ons, the number of styles and languages you have will have a large effect on the time to rebuild templates. Reducing the number of styles you have will likely speed this up.

 

[ScarletCox]

When it comes to permissions, the time is mostly down to the number of permission combinations you have (distinct sets of user group membership or number of users with specific permissions) and the number of nodes (or other content that can have specific permissions). If you have a lot of either, that will mean more work. You can trigger a permission clean up under rebuild caches which will remove any unused permission combinations.

Ah hah! We had a hell of a lot of really shonky permissions sets after the migration from IPB, and it's taken us bloody ages to create Categories, put the folders in the right categories, strip out the excessive crazy permissions IPB invented and pare them down to proper inheritance masks, and so on. I've done the permission clean up now, so let's see if that helps!

 

[ScarletCox]

And FWIW there are 356 items in our Node Tree. We might not be the traditional "big board" but we're very tidy!

 

[ScarletCox]

Four minutes! Vast improvement!

Out of interest is there a reason this runs as a foreground task rather than a cron job?

 

[Mike]

The action isn't complete until the necessary rebuilds are done. We need to make this clear otherwise things might not work as you expect until it's finished.

 

[ScarletCox]

Gotcha. Cheers, @Mike!