Curious: What exactly happens when a thread goes over 10,000 posts?

hatrickpatrick

It's well known on Boards that Megathreads have to be rolled over into new threads once they get close to 10,000 posts, as 10,000 posts in any one thread causes hamster trouble. I'm curious, as a former web developer of PHP and MySQL who never operated a server with anything near that amount of traffic to deal with, what specifically breaks down when threads go over this number? My assumption is that SQL queries returning this number of results and having to be divided by the specified number of posts per page etc just become sluggish when the result count is that high. Is this correct, or is there something more interesting going on which causes 10,000 to be the "magic number" for slower server behaviour? Is it even related to SQL queries at all, or does the glitching happen at a different stage in the page-serving process?

Been curious about this for years, only just now bothering to ask

Beasty

We risk armageddon. Tsunami's cannot be discounted. Kim Jong-il may start a nuclear war. Hamsters may actually die....

It is not guaranteed that any of the above coincide with a thread going over 10k, but equally there is no assurance they will not

In practice though, nothing happens. The thread limit was put forward by the site development team some time ago, as the v-bulletin base for the site was (and indeed is still) creaking. There are examples of threads that have gone well past that number, and indeed we still see threads exceeding 10k in posts before a new one is started. It's a case of a figure set that the developers were happy will not bring on a disaster, be it pestilence or indeed something like the site crashing. A case of better safe than sorry

I'm sure one of the guys from the office will be along to correct any of my comments that may be a little OTT....

Beasty

Over 57,000 in this one