How exactly does a forum run out of space?

[Kakero]

I'm a member of this private forum for our guild in Ragnarok Online ( a mmorpg ). This forum has been in existance for 2 months. Today the administrator of the forum declared that they are choosing a forum with bigger space because the current one in running out of space.

I have tried asking whether all my screenshots ( I posted lots of screenshots in the forum ) is partly to be blame for the forum lack of space? However, none dare tell me ( probably because they personally know me ).

So I end up asking here in Ironworks. Am I responsible for the forum lack of space?
Or is it because of other factors like forum members posted lots of posts? or is it because of forum members custom avatars? or something else?

thanks.

[Aragorn1]

As i understand it, web space can fill up just like a hard drive, that's why posts are deleted after time. A forum will always 'fill up' the issue is more how much content you want to keep before you have to start deleting things, i.e. how far you want the thread in the forum to go back to.

There are people who will understnad this better amd i may be totally wrong, so I wait to be told i'm an idiot

[Bozos of Bones]

IW has no upload function, so it saves alot on pictures an image sigs that are hosted elsewhere. The threads are just text files, and so are profiles, but they can add up quickly.
The reason things here are being archived constantly is not to conserve space but to achieve better search speeds. A frien of mine told me that some forums that archive old posts have a special compression method that reduces them to, like a third or something. Is this true?

[mad=dog]

There is also another posibility apart from mere disk space. If you look at the URL for this topic you'll see
?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=000957
This is the variables the GET function process when it generates a HTML corresponding to the browser request. Basically you ask it to get topic number 957 in forum 34. Evidently this forum can handle 100 seperate boards with 1000000 topics each. A lot of posting to run out. However had it been
?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=957
we would be 43 entries short of running out.

[Xiphias]

Originally posted by Bozos of Bones: A frien of mine told me that some forums that archive old posts have a special compression method that reduces them to, like a third or something. Is this true?

Text files can be compressed by a lot, often to <5% of their original size. Of course the more thorough the compression os often the slower it is to uncompress so you can search them.

[Kakero]

Originally posted by Bozos of Bones: IW has no upload function, so it saves alot on pictures an image sigs that are hosted elsewhere. The threads are just text files, and so are profiles, but they can add up quickly.

You somewhat confirm my suspicion. I upload the screenshot directly into the forum. That might explain why the forum run out of space too quickly.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Xiphias: quote: Originally posted by Bozos of Bones: A frien of mine told me that some forums that archive old posts have a special compression method that reduces them to, like a third or something. Is this true?

Text files can be compressed by a lot, often to <5% of their original size. Of course the more thorough the compression os often the slower it is to uncompress so you can search them. [/QUOTE]Forum posts would not be stored in text files. Ever. Unless it was realy primative software. A relational DBMS a) is easier to code for, b) provides better lookup efficiency (if it's indexed well, it could be near constant-time), c) provides fast updates/insertions (constant time instead of what is likely linear time), and d) generally just works better. The benifit of archiving posts is more to do with databases and time than size (non-volatile data always uses shared locks, can be less processing to use locks on (it can be done at higher levels), can be indexed better (thus reducing lookup complexity), etc).

Originally posted by mad=dog: There is also another posibility apart from mere disk space. If you look at the URL for this topic you'll see ?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=000957 This is the variables the GET function process when it generates a HTML corresponding to the browser request. Basically you ask it to get topic number 957 in forum 34. Evidently this forum can handle 100 seperate boards with 1000000 topics each. A lot of posting to run out. However had it been ?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=957 we would be 43 entries short of running out.

Kindof, but not realy. While the range of the integer will affect how many unique things it can address, there are ways around that, and - more importantly - the URL tells us nothing of what that could be. If you remove the leading zeros, you will end up at the same place, when the script on the server reads it in, it is almost undoubtedly represented as a number rather than a string - and thus, the leading zeroes are redundant. Also, an implementation using a CHAR (which is the smallest anyone sane would go) would be able to uniquely address 10,000,000 topics - an order of magnitude more than what you say Ironworks can handle.


Remembering that storage these days is cheap (when was the last time you bought a harddrive measured in hundreds of megabytes?), there are only four conceivable ways that a forum could 'fill up':
1) Realy crappy software (as in, worse than UBB - which is a herculean task indeed).
2) Realy archaic hardware (from before the Web was created).
3) The server itself filling up due to other things (which could be the case if it a) hosts heaps of other stuff (other forums/sites, linux distros, feature-length movies, records of security vulnerabilities in MSIE/Outlook), or b) is also used as a desktop system (which would be stupid).
4) The host is exagerating.

[ 06-21-2005, 12:29 AM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]