Staggering of Large Amounts of Alerts

Warchamp7

Active member
I recently tried adding Xfrocks Forum Watch add on so that I could have all our users watching the News forum, and receive an alert when a new thread was made.

Unfortunately, trying to make a news thread after that would time out, presumably from trying to alert such a massive number of users.

If that indeed is what the problem was, it concerns me that if enough users watched a forum or thread, it could potentially cause problems.
 
Alerts are handled by XenForo, all the Forum Watch add on does is force all users of a user group to be watching a forum. As far as I understand it the author cannot do anything to have XenForo stagger large amounts of alerts.
 
Alerts are handled by XenForo, all the Forum Watch add on does is force all users of a user group to be watching a forum. As far as I understand it the author cannot do anything to have XenForo stagger large amounts of alerts.
You are wrong, it is an add-on issue that is causing this for you, try disabling the add-on and everything should be fine. Many large boards haven't reported such problems.

And what version of XenForo are you using? 1.2 or 1.1?
 
You are wrong, it is an add-on issue that is causing this for you, try disabling the add-on and everything should be fine. Many large boards haven't reported such problems.

And what version of XenForo are you using? 1.2 or 1.1?

I know the add-on causes the problem, but it causes a problem because XenForo currently doesn't handle massive amounts of simultaneous alerts elegantly. I'm running 1.2
 
I know the add-on causes the problem, but it causes a problem because XenForo currently doesn't handle massive amounts of simultaneous alerts elegantly. I'm running 1.2
How are you so sure its because XenForo currently doesn't handle massive amounts of simultaneous alerts elegantly?

The amount of people "following" the announcement forums on XenForo would presumably be very large, XenForo never encountered a problem. Many big boards use XenForo (huge, large boards), they never encounter any issue. So it points to it not necessarily being a issue with XenForo, there can be many many issues. It can be with your webhost, they can limit something causing timeouts. It can be another add-on conflicting and thus causing more issues, saying it is a fault on XenForo's end is fine if you have solid proof to back that up, but currently no one has complained about alerts not being handled gracefully.

Thus pointing the blame at XenForo is not the right thing to do because at the end of the issue this won't be XenForo's fault at all. Does the timeout generate any error in the error log, or any error on the front end? What is the message you get after the timeout/any error pops up? Those logs will help us reach the core of the issue.

I would also like to inform you that 1.2 adds options to watch forums and receive alerts, but the add-on extends that feature (to force alerts onto a certain usergroup), so at some part it is the add-on to blame not XenForo and its way of handling alerts. As far as I'm aware XenForo even makes use of the deferred system to handle mass alerts (not sure, did read about something though).

The best thing that will enable others to help you would be to post any error logs that occur, or ask the add-on developer to look into this issue (via giving access to your forums if required). Are you on a shared host, VPS or Dedicated? We need to find out why the timeout is exactly happening.
 
Before jumping at the OP, you might want to look at: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/optimising-alerts-by-mass-sending-method.35881/

While some of what is said is true, there is scope for improvement in the core. However, the add-on is potentially causing a situation that wasn't expected. Even having hundreds of alerts shouldn't be an issue.

The points regarding server speed are also potentially valid. There's a huge variation here.
 
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