XF 1.4 Will this slow down my forum.

[Goodfella]

Greetings all,

Hope everyone here is well. So I have a add-on (Showcase) by Bob. I must say great addon but ill save that for later.
So what happens is when a item is added to the Showcase you have the option to create a thread, it automatically creates that thread and posts it in a forum of your choice.
What im looking for is someone to write a script, where instead of a thread being created it creates a Forum inside a category.
So my question regarding XF is, I currently have 2,500 items in my showcase (all of which i will be looking at creating forums for (all will be in one category)). I was told by a developer if i were to create 2,500 forums for these items that my website would be running very slow.


I attatched the image just to make sure that a forum was actually what i thought it was. So if you see the image the Category is "The Playground", and everything under that category is a forum? What im looking to do is to create 2,500 of these forums under One category.

Is this a bad idea? What is a alternative?

Thank you all for the help!
Gf

 

[Paul B]

I can't imagine the page would be that usable with 2,500 forums.

How many are going to be siblings (at the same level)?

 

[Goodfella]

I can't imagine the page would be that usable with 2,500 forums.

How many are going to be siblings (at the same level)?

All of them would be at the same level. So all of them would be on the same level. Im not sure if im explaining this right =/


Example:

Category
Forum 1
Forum2
Forum3
Forum4
...
...
...
Forum 2,500

 

[Paul B]

The page would be completely useless.

How is anyone going to find anything, or even be bothered to scroll down 2,500 forums?

 

[SnoSheriff]

Will this website have human users? If so, how would they navigate that many forums?

Why do you want this to be represented as forums vs threads?

 

[Goodfella]

They wouldnt have to scroll, I would try to hide the node with the forums in them. Ill try to explain what im trying to do, let me know if i loose you anywhere.

As i said im using the Showcase add-on, which i turned into a School review system. The addon has the option to create a thread for each school (currently 2,500 schools). When youre on the landing page of a school there is a button on the page that says "Discuss this School" which used to say "Discuss this Item" before I edited it. When the button is pressed it takes you to the specific thread created for that school

Since this is a school review system if i use a thread, I will have many people asking different topic questions in that same thread (tuition questions, enterance questions, exam questions, lecture questions, requirements, or just general chat amongst students).
I thought that it would be a good idea that instead of a thread with many pages of different topics, i would just create a forum with two prefixes (Pre-Med and Med). So when someone is on the schools landing page (in the Showcase add-on) when they select "Discuss this School" they would be taken to the forum for that specific school where they could start a new thread based on that school.
When creating a thread they would have the option to select prefixes pre-med or med, whatever their questions is based on.

I hope this makes some more sense, if you would like to see the review system just like this and I will send you the link in a convo, it might be better to put a visual to it.

Thanks!

 

[SnoSheriff]

As an end user I don't want to view that many forums. It would be VERY cumbersome to use and navigate.

My recommendation would be to group the schools by some common category and load the pics as threads into the common category forum grouping. For example, group they schools by zip code, city, state, school type. If someone want so find something about specific school then they can search the forum using school name key words....

 

[Goodfella]

As an end user I don't want to view that many forums. It would be VERY cumbersome to use and navigate.

I did say i would try to hide the category/node with all the forums in it.

The schools are grouped by Country. I dont think youre quiet understanding what im trying to achieve...

Bottom line is what im trying to achieve is for each school to have its own dedicated area (which i thought the forum would be) and not a thread.

 

[Daniel Hood]

So basically you're not going to have an index where all the forums are listed, you're relying on each visitor accessing their schools forum/showcase item directly?

 

[Goodfella]

So basically you're not going to have an index where all the forums are listed, you're relying on each visitor accessing their schools forum/showcase item directly?

For the specific school forums, yes they would access it via showcase item directly or search.

 

[Daniel Hood]

Alright, it should perform fine. Just uncheck the "display in node list" for each forum to avoid the unfriendly user interface. There shouldn't be any performance issue.

 

[Goodfella]

Alright, it should perform fine. Just uncheck the "display in node list" for each forum to avoid the unfriendly user interface. There shouldn't be any performance issue.

This is what I was told by one developer..

"It is slow because XenForo usually rebuild permission for all nodes when something is changed. It works okie if you have less than 100 nodes and less than 10 user groups (that is about a thousand combination). When you have 2500 forums, that will be 25000 combination and that will be just slow. And because it is slow, the rebuild process sometime stopped half way, leaving you with a corrupted / incomplete permission table. Also, having that many forums may kill the caching because the data is too big."

 

[Daniel Hood]

Avoid making changes to the permissions of the forums in that category and you won't trigger the rebuild. It's kind of like, once you get it set leave it, type thing. Obviously some processes such as getting board stats and what not will be a little slower. The caching should be fine. You may have to increase the timeout limits. You may run into issues on shared hosting with limited resources. I'm not saying it's going to perform like it would if you only have one node but you should be able to run it fine. The server isn't going to fry trying to run your site or anything.

 

[Goodfella]

Avoid making changes to the permissions of the forums in that category and you won't trigger the rebuild. It's kind of like, once you get it set leave it, type thing. Obviously some processes such as getting board stats and what not will be a little slower. The caching should be fine. You may have to increase the timeout limits. You may run into issues on shared hosting with limited resources. I'm not saying it's going to perform like it would if you only have one node but you should be able to run it fine. The server isn't going to fry trying to run your site or anything.

Thank you very much for the explanation