I have encountered a drain like you described, and it stems from the subscribe code selecting all the recent posts and then using the top x (the subscribe max e-mails) rather than selecting just x posts. I've made this and several other optimizations in the subscription handling for 1.1.7 to fix this problem - try downloading the attached files (admin/GForum/Subscribe.pm and admin/cron/subscribe.pl) and see if it still drains system resources. Note that you will probably need to edit the "use lib" and GForum::init() lines in subscribe.pl if you download this.

subscribe.pl has a new option: -f. With this update (and thus 1.1.7) you can change your cron job to run:

/path/to/admin/cron/subscribe.pl -s -d -f "/path/to/admin/cron/subscribe.log"

It will enable debug mode and log the debugging into the file specified. This can help diagnose exactly where any problem and/or slowdown in the subscribing is happening. Don't leave the -d and -f options on permanently - they'll slowly fill up your drive and slow the subscription down a little bit.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com