yikes! after having a popular UBB for a year the disk ...

[DMB]

I've been running a really high traffic UBB on my site for a year now and I just checked the disk space it's taking up ...[nbsp][nbsp]AHHHH![nbsp][nbsp]Around 85 MB![nbsp][nbsp]Now I have to pay extra for more disk space.[nbsp][nbsp]Any ideas on what to do?[nbsp][nbsp]I'm thinking that I'll just go through and prune the oldest BIGGEST topics with most replies that won't really be missed.[nbsp][nbsp]I don't have any other choices, right?[nbsp][nbsp]If i use the archive feature, will that lower the space that the topics take up?[nbsp][nbsp]Thanks.

[Mandi]

Archive will take up the same (maybe more) space.[nbsp][nbsp]Why not prune your oldest topics, rather than using the criteria of the "most popular" (ie, most responses) - if some of those old topics are worth keeping, then go ahead and archive them.[nbsp][nbsp]When I archive, I edit through the thread and remove the "me too" or "that's a shame" type posts, as I don't feel this is useful info people will be looking into an archive for . . . and therefore they do take up less space.

I prune nearly all my boards at 12 days, I feel if it's not current conversation, I am not paying for the storage![nbsp][nbsp]But of course, every board has a different purpose.[nbsp]

[Charles Capps]

For now, yes, prune prune prune.[nbsp][nbsp]
Er, or shell out the money for a larger account.[nbsp][nbsp]
I'm at 170 megs or so, much of that being my UBB.

I'm working on a way to dramatically bring that down through some cheap tricks...[nbsp][nbsp]I'll keep ya updated.[nbsp][nbsp]:)

[Stephen]

i was thinking about this recently. with 2 replies to this thread i looked at the source code for the page. i figure the messages take between 10-20 percent of the file size. in each case, the "mail this person" and "modify this post" links took up more space than the message itself.

so... one way to *dramatically* reduce memory is to serve the pages dynamically, which i'm considering doing with my own board. it's not actually UBB code but works the same way. all you'd need to do is find the subroutine that writes the HTML page and hook it into the forumdisplay script, sending the code to the browser instead of to file each time someone requests a thread.

of course, for a very busy site that means lots of strain on the server :( so maybe it's not the best thing under those circumstances (just how bad it is i'll leave for someone more expert to say). but it is relatively easy to implement.

another way, which would require some work, is to write a self-pruning script which writes HTML pages but automatically (every week, say) prunes those older than a certain date, and then only serves the old threads dynamically (on the rare occasions that someone looks them up). i like this idea, but don't have the time to implement it. but food for thought...

P.S. for all i know, archived messages on the UBB work exactly that way. but i guess not, judging from what has been said above.

[Charles Capps]

What I'm working on is rendering the ARCHIVES in PHP...[nbsp][nbsp]The format would be very stripped down to minimize disk access...

Keep everything older than a month archived courtest of the mass archive hack, and you you can save LOADS of disk space.

[PaulKroll]

Would it be worth it to gzip the body of the messages before inclusion in an archive database?[nbsp][nbsp]I'm not yet familiar enough with MySQL to know how well it handles variable-sized binary data, but assuming it doesn't have a problem there, zlib is linked into PHP here. :)

Course, the body of some messages is small enough to not make a difference.[nbsp][nbsp]Still, anything over about 300 bytes should compress at least a LITTLE...

This probably wouldn't be too bad on the server: gzip uncompressing is generally faster than compressing, so if the average body size is past a few hundred bytes, it might be worth it.