Improving Instance Performance (Megatopics, Database Size and Extreme Load)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Paracelsus

We have around 80 megatopics pumping the whole time (128k posts on the largest one).

This is a profoundly bad idea and you should shut those topics down in favor of smaller yearly or seasonal ones. See

The MEGATOPIC: public good, or public menace?

When we founded Discourse in 2013, I had the idea that we’d support topics of any length or size, from 10 replies to 100 to 10,000 to 100,000 or even more! [image] A few years ago we ran into a technical limitation where we send down a list of all the post IDs in the topic when you enter the topic. This starts to cause problems on the client – particularly older smartphones with less memory and CPU power – at around ~10,000 replies, so we created a site setting that automatically closes topic…