XF 2.1 Unable to merge posts in very large thread

[Warchamp7]

We have a few extremely large threads on our forum, and we've encountered issues with things like merging and deleting posts in those threads on 2.1

When trying to merge, the Inline moderation - Merge posts dialog stays open with the loading bar at the top of the page. After a while, the loading bar disappears and the dialog stays open. No merge takes place.

If I copy the posts in question out of the thread, into another one that is smaller, and then attempt to merge the posts in that smaller thread, there is no issue. The merge completes in about a second.

The thread in question here has over 220,000 posts and the post attempting to be merged is around 24,000,000th~ on the forum

 

[Warchamp7]

Bumping this.

In the old days on other forum software, very large threads would get locked and a new one created, to avoid performance issues as the conversation continued. XenForo's performance showed itself to be much better when we originally switched to XF1 and we did away with that approach.

Is XenForo expected to handle these giant threads, or should we return to that method?

 

[whynot]

The thread in question here has over 220,000 posts...

Is XenForo expected to handle these giant threads, or should we return to that method?

IMO yes, you should return to that method.

 

[Warchamp7]

IMO yes, you should return to that method.

It's a solution sure, but I'd like to hear from the devs if they expect XenForo to handle this or not.

If not, I'd imagine they'd want some sort of warning or restriction for forum admins to be informed/adjust

 

[Mike]

TBH, I don't think a thread with 220,000 posts is at all something we've considered. I would certainly consider a 10,000 post thread to be very large (though not unreasonably so). 220k is essentially an order of magnitude larger and larger than many of our customers' entire sites. I'd consider XF.com to be a decent size forum and that would compare to having about 15% of all of our posts in one thread.

So yes, it's very possible that some less common operations (which often require rebuilds of certain information across the whole thread) will fall over at that level.

 

[Mouth]

should we return to that method?

All my large perpetual threads (admittably nowhere near as large as yours) I always split and put them into yearly, eg. Your photos 2019, Your photos 2020, etc. Irrespective of performance, which I don't experience any issues, it just makes it cleaner for searching and relevance.
You could split out your existing very large thread(s) into something like this quite easily with a few SQL statements.