Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
Steve St.Laurent
Staff Alumni
I discovered a problem last night with the vB database. The number of posts and threads shown in the forums did (does) not match up with the number of records in the databases. I found this out by looking at the stats on the front page which goes by the number of records in the database and comparing them to what the forums showed at the bottom. After looking at the database I found a bunch of really old threads that were attached to forums that did not exist and had a copy in a forum that did exist. There were approximately 18,000 of these. These threads were from a time period before I took over the webmaster job. It was probably a bug in one of the previous versions of vB that created these.
There is an "orphan thread" routine that goes through and cleans things out so I attempted to run that. Well, running that routine brought the site to it's knees because of the number of queries it ran. Once I figured out what was going on (about an hour worth) I shut down the forums to try to get this done as fast as possible. What I found was that because those posts were in the search engine it was going to take ~48 hours to delete all those threads. Because of this I had to wipe out the search engine
and start that process over again. So, the BAD news is that it will now take about a week to process all of the posts and put them into the search engine and the site will be slower than normal during that entire process .
There are still some issues with the database that I will be contacting vB about because there are 30 posts that aren't being recognized by the forum software and ~3,000 threads also not being recognized by the software that are in the database. This situation has been with us all along I am quite sure. The old version of vB compiled it's stats differently (the same as the stats on the front page) and that's why I never noticed it until now.
I've been pouring through data for the last 5 hours and I can't keep my eyes open any longer. Thus far I haven't been able to figure out a pattern or even which records aren't being shown (although I've found some). Once I get some rest and can look at the data with a fresh mind I'll figure out what's going on and get ahold of vB to see what can be done about it - if anything even needs to be done.
Sorry for any inconvenience tonight caused you and I'm really sorry that the search engine rebuild is having to be started all over again. The good news is that the database is a lot cleaner now than it was 5 hours ago which will help with mysql performance.
I'm going to bed . . . .
-Steve St. Laurent
Webmaster
There is an "orphan thread" routine that goes through and cleans things out so I attempted to run that. Well, running that routine brought the site to it's knees because of the number of queries it ran. Once I figured out what was going on (about an hour worth) I shut down the forums to try to get this done as fast as possible. What I found was that because those posts were in the search engine it was going to take ~48 hours to delete all those threads. Because of this I had to wipe out the search engine
and start that process over again. So, the BAD news is that it will now take about a week to process all of the posts and put them into the search engine and the site will be slower than normal during that entire process . There are still some issues with the database that I will be contacting vB about because there are 30 posts that aren't being recognized by the forum software and ~3,000 threads also not being recognized by the software that are in the database. This situation has been with us all along I am quite sure. The old version of vB compiled it's stats differently (the same as the stats on the front page) and that's why I never noticed it until now.
I've been pouring through data for the last 5 hours and I can't keep my eyes open any longer. Thus far I haven't been able to figure out a pattern or even which records aren't being shown (although I've found some). Once I get some rest and can look at the data with a fresh mind I'll figure out what's going on and get ahold of vB to see what can be done about it - if anything even needs to be done.
Sorry for any inconvenience tonight caused you and I'm really sorry that the search engine rebuild is having to be started all over again. The good news is that the database is a lot cleaner now than it was 5 hours ago which will help with mysql performance.
I'm going to bed . . . .
-Steve St. Laurent
Webmaster
