So you’ve probably noticed over the last few days that the forum will screech to a halt every so often. It’s been pretty bad. “Intolerable” would be a reasonable way to describe it. :(
Basically what’s happened is that we’ve run out of space. It looks like we either need to buy more or we need to cull older posts. We’re trying to figure out what to do now, and we’ll hopefully have a resolution soon. Apologies for the frequent slowdowns and please bear with us as we figure it out. I’ll keep folks posted here.
-Tom
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It’s a dumb Discourse upgrade issue where it needs to make a complete clone of the database in order to upgrade properly. Other than that, we have plenty of room.
The folks at Discourse included a Postgres version update in a recent update – it’s the upgrading of the containerized Postgres that requires the data all to be written out and duplicated. While you could argue whether that Postgres upgrade was necessary as part of the Discourse update, the size issues that it causes during upgrade aren’t of Discourse’s making.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Their default upgrade requires double the currently used space to upgrade the DB, so you need three times your currently used space to proceed. The trick way only requires one extra complete copy. It’s pretty stupid, but I guess this is a postgresql problem not a discourse problem.
I’m reindexing post searches now, so performance may not be super duper. I basically have to learn to use a whole new RDBMS, which is not my preference.
Anyway if this doesn’t work next I’m going to reindex the entire database and then vacuum/analyze everything.
That won’t be necessary, the nuclear option is restoring from backup on a new host, which upgrades everything. Downside there is a) it’s a pain in the ass and b) we’d lose all posts to the old host for the couple of days it would take to do.
This seems like a great time to re-enable likes and simply purge any post that doesn’t hit a certain threshold of positive engagement after 90 days or something. 😁
