Why it takes forever to delete a post or topic

[wynnyelle]

Whenever I am trying to delete a topic or a post on my site, no matter what board it is in or how long the topic is or who made the post, it takes FOREVER. Like I sit there waiting and waiting for it to load. But other pages load ok at the same time. Could anyone maybe give me a clue to how to fix this?

[xrunner]

Whenever I am trying to delete a topic or a post on my site, no matter what board it is in or how long the topic is or who made the post, it takes FOREVER.

How long is forever? Can you estimate the time period?

Are other actions on the forum taking longer than you remembered they took in the past?

[Arantor]

Considering we're talking the single largest SMF installation out there, this is uncharted territory.

The biggest problem with deleting a post or topic is the housekeeping that has to go with it - all the posts have to be updated, the user post counts have to be updated, the topic itself has to be updated, because they all have to be moved into the recycle bin.

Given the size of what's going on, I'd be willing to bet that it's a locking problem somewhere, but without *serious* diagnostic investigation, it's impossible to say for sure.

[wynnyelle]

Okay, but at least you just told me more than I already knew, so we are getting somewhere.

It takes up to around a minute or two of sitting there, maybe more. Sometimes it does time out.

People delete posts on much huger sites, like Tumblr, Twitter etc. so there must be a way to counter this somehow.

What sort of diagnostic investigation are we talking about?

[Arantor]

Yes, but those huger sites aren't running on a single server. They're running on huge clusters, and have structures designed for the kinds of scale they have, SMF's has never been battle-hardened on that sort of scale.

As far as diagnostic investigation goes, obtaining the query log while deleting posts and topics, then running that through profilers, and seeing what is holding things up and that should give you some idea why.

[wynnyelle]

Is the query log obtainable through Cpanel? I can do a test delete and get the query tonight if so.

[Arantor]

Unlikely. Normally it requires specific configuration of MySQL, though if it's straight queries, these should be hitting the slow query log. Might be worth asking your host if there's anything in there for your site.

[wynnyelle]

That would be Liroy. I bug him way too much already, lol. I'll wait and ask him tomorrow, it's not super urgent. Thanks!