- this issue has existed for months
- today the forum has about 405 categories
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around a 502 error encountered when re-ordering categories in a Discourse forum with approximately 405 categories. Ethsim2 reports the issue has persisted for months and occurred again recently, prompting speculation about server performance. pfaffman suggests the server may be too slow for such a large number of categories and notes that hundreds of categories aren’t recommended. He also shares that he previously managed similar workloads using Rails commands. Ethsim2 mentions using a VPS with NVMe storage and speculates that a Dedicated Core plan might resolve the issue. tobiaseigen humorously comments on the complexity of the setup. Ethsim2 concludes that the issue was temporary, resolved upon retrying, and is no longer a concern.
I suspect it’s just that your server is too slow to accomplish the task. Hundreds of categories isn’t really recommended.
The way I’ve sorted hundreds of categories before was in rails.
Ah – this problem was actually why I chose the IONOS VPS L. Previously I found better performance with the IONOS Data Center Designer, where I was also using a VPS. I’ve never experienced the Dedicated Core offering, which could potentially null this issue, but I believe the Designer VPS had faster NVMe and maybe higher per-core turbo.
The UI loading of the composer’s category selector is slow, but that encourages people to browse into the desired category first, IMHO.
Nice - I think we’re into the command line vs. UI discussion again 
Here’s something I recommended to someone else (that I still haven’t tested).
You’re doing some crazy stuff with Discourse, Ethan!
Were you able to resolve your issue?
Haha thanks Tobias! 
It only happened that one time — I haven’t run any Rails commands or anything like that, just through the UI. The same operation worked after retrying, so it looked like a temporary 502 rather than a lasting issue.
Haven’t needed to re-order categories since, so it’s not bothering me now. 