View all posts

gerky

Is it possible to have an option in thread tools to view all the posts in a thread on one page, I tend to scroll read threads a good bit and think it would be quite useful.

seamus

This would be unwieldy. Many threads have a few hundreds posts and some number in the tens of thousands.

The current maximum number of posts per page is 40 - this isn't for niceness, it's because retrieving each post from the database requires a certain amount of I/O bandwidth (internally on the server) & disk time. The more posts you have to retrieve, the more of both of these resources will be required.

This is why all such softwares paginate the results - retrieving a large number of rows from a database causes performance problems while everyone else waits for the database to retrieve the thread you want to view.

In addition, the network bandwidth required to send the page to you, while not massive, adds up overall if hundreds of us are using it.

In short, this is possible but will never be done. If anything, reducing the maximum number of posts per page from 40 to 20 would yield improvements in database performance overall, but would annoy quite a lot of us.

I'm like you - if I could have everything on one page, I could. We are unfortunately limited by the laws of physics

CuLT

seamus appears to have covered everything

gerky

Thanks guys,

My brain must be on a go slow, I never thought of the huge threads that are on boards like the pub in BGRH.

I'll think before posting the next time:)