I’m considering using Discourse as the backend for my website and app, but I haven’t seen any documentation on its scaling limits. What’s the maximum number of categories we can have? Is it 1000? 10,000? 100,000? I plan to heavily use the API and create a custom frontend for both web and mobile. Part of this is programmatically creating a new Category whenever a user wants to. So it’s more of a backend systems question than the UI. For example, will the /categories.json endpoint scale? It doesn’t seem paginated. Thanks!

Hi! Just wondering if you found the answer to this? Specifically I’m also wondering about the max number of tags.

Determining a “maximum” depends on what you consider to be the limiting factor. I don’t see a problem with PostgreSQL PostgreSQL: About Maximum Table Size 32 TB Even with optimal indexing, query speeds will at some point take “too long”. What that is will vary from person to person. Then there’s Ruby, Ember, bandwidth and browser limits. Feel free to research, but I wouldn’t worry about those. I think that long before any software limits are reached “sane” limits will have already been passed. And what that would be will vary from person to person and how they interact with the information. tl;dr You will break your users long before you break any code.

I have 2500 categorys and my demand up to 3000 category, can i continue? [image]

Personally I never subscribe to a site that has 2500 categories. Virtually you can create all the categories you want but your site will only be confusing and not navigable. Note that an official answer has already been given to your question and also an alternative to using categories. [image] sam: 500 to 1000 is safe If you need more consider tags Additionally you can have a very large number of groups

The problem of categories in the first place is the problem of transparency and navigation for users. Working previously on the catalogue dmoz.org and making categories for Russian directories, we are faced with the fact that with a large number of categories, problems arise in users. A large number of categories, it’s like there are no more categories. They become unnecessary, impossible to use. Nobody understands the structure of the site, including those who did it. I think that’s the problem. Navigation should be navigation, and if it loses its functions, it is sad.

UI considerations aside, I’m curious what happens when you get up into the 1000+ categories range. Would responses just take a little bit longer on average, or are there catastrophic consequences? Is this something that can be solved by throwing better hardware at the problem? Like the OP, I’m working on a project that could easily have 1000s of categories. It uses group based permissions heavily and an individual user may only be able to see a handful (this is why I can’t use tags). So I’m not worried as much about the UI being overwhelming, but would like to know what the bottleneck is at that higher range.

[image] Grayden_Shand: I’m curious what happens when you get up into the 1000+ categories range. Honestly probably nothing terrible, unless you are admin and have access to 1000+ categories. At that point we would ship you every single category json in your first page, the categories page would get slow both server side and client side.

Relating to this: If I have 100s to 1000s of categories, is there an option for me to limit the number of search results? My problem: Due to a large number of categories, clicking on the dropdown when creating a new topic, or searching for categories when subscribing to them, has a long delay (10s of seconds). I know we have an option to restrict the number of results in such scenarios to tags. Do we have/can we have the same for categories?

[image] Tayyab_Anwar: Do we have/can we have the same for categories? Hi @Tayyab_Anwar I just checked the DB for you and there are no settings related to restricting categories (for searches) in the DB. There are some restrictions in the UI available (as you know): [Screen Shot 2020-06-07 at 7.26.24 PM] So, it looks like you would need to create a plugin to add extra features to restrict search results based on categories and related criteria. Hope this helps.

Can you share some numbers regarding the resources you need for hosting? How much RAM, CPU are you normally using. Also, how is the user experience, how fast does it load - are there bottlenecks in some areas? I’m asking because I want to secure conversations between patients and medics: [image] How many categories can discourse support? Support I’m also looking into securing conversations between a patient and a medic. The only solution I found so far by reading the documentation is to: create a category for the user via API create a group for the user via API assign the pationt group, the medic and the staff groups to the category This way, the patient can and the medic can have interactions that only they can see. Also more medics could be added to the discussion and they would see the discussions. Staff can oversee for abuse.

What's the maximum number of categories we can have?

Development

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) July 11, 2020, 3:21pm 16

I have a site with over 500 categories (if I recall correctly). I think it was doing ok on an $80/month cpu optimized droplet with about 250k page views per month.

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How many categories can discourse support? Product Support	12	2714	August 5, 2022
Large number of forums / categories / groups? Community Building	7	2815	February 19, 2024
Do categories scale? Development	3	3008	June 5, 2016
Category option: max topics per user (2 use-case examples) Feature	8	2587	July 28, 2014
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What's the maximum number of categories we can have?

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