Does the number of pages in a topic affect performance?

[stt442]

Hi there,

On a forum I visit, they delete topics that are larger than 100 pages. The admin said they were given recommendations to keep topics under 100 pages. They were told that it stresses the database if the topic is too large.

Is this true with smf 2.0.6? Does it matter how many pages topic has?

Thanks

[margarett]

Is this true with smf 2.0.6?

You should update your forum urgently. You're several versions behind.

I would suggest that the performance difference between 10 topics with 200 pages and 200 topics with 10 pages is marginal, if any... In some specific operations it should be different (eg, deleting should be one of them) but for the regular forum operation I don't think it matters...

[青山 素子]

The number of pages varies quite a bit with how many posts are displayed on a page, so "100 pages" is very vague. SMF should be able to handle a lot of posts in a single topic if the server is appropriately configured.

[stt442]

I'm not administrating that specific forum, so I don't know how it's configured.

It displays 15 post per page. So that would make 1500 post per topic. They were told that if the post number is higher in a topic, even reading that topic would make the whole site slower.

I don't know how modern SMF works, but to me.. that 1500 post per topic sounds low. Maybe that advice was given to an earlier version of SMF, who knows.
Is 1500 post per topic so much that if affects the performance?

@margarett
I'll tell them to update.

[Kindred]

no...   I have seen topics with 3,000 posts in the topic....

there is no soft limit to the number of "pages" in a topic  especially since that can actually vary BY USER (each user can set their own option for posts per page)

[margarett]

Do note, posts per page yes, that would affect performance as there is a lot more data to retrieve in each page load

[Kindred]

but not pages in a topic...

the load of page 238 would be pretty much the same as the load of page 1

[stt442]

Ok, thanks .