Advice Requested: Top Techniques for Podlove Publisher Optimization for Big Podcast Collections

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Hello Everyone,

I’ve been using the Podlove Publisher for my podcast, and it has been a fantastic tool for managing episodes and delivering them to my audience. Recently, my podcast library has grown significantly, and I’m starting to notice a few performance challenges, especially when managing metadata and analytics for over 200 episodes.

I wanted to reach out to the community for advice on best practices for optimizing the Podlove Publisher when dealing with a large volume of episodes. Specifically, I’m curious about the following:

  1. Database Optimization: Are there any specific tweaks or configurations I should consider for the database to ensure smooth performance?
  2. Episode Archiving: Is there a recommended method for archiving older episodes to reduce the load on the system while still keeping them accessible to listeners?
  3. Analytics Management: With more episodes, the analytics dashboard takes longer to load. Are there ways to streamline or improve analytics performance?
  4. General Tips: Any other advice or insights for managing a growing podcast library with Podlove would be greatly appreciated.

I’m currently hosting my website on a shared hosting plan, but I’m open to upgrading to a dedicated server or using a CDN if it would make a noticeable difference. If you’ve faced similar challenges or have found creative solutions, I’d love to hear about them!

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions. I’m looking forward to learning from the collective wisdom of this community.

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Hi,

thanks for reaching out:

Database Optimization: I don’t know of any proven optimisations. Or let’s say, anything that was proven to be a benefit to everyone made its was to the codebase. I can only give general advice like inspecting slow queries to see if there are any expensive ones that might benefit from an additional index.

Episode Archiving: I’m not aware anyone is doing that. The system itself should be able to handle hundreds of episodes. However at some point feed size or feed generation time might become an issue. Then you may consider turning on feed pagination in the feed settings, to only keep the first XX episodes in the main feed. Note however that not all clients support pagination, so these clients will only see the latest XX episodes.

Analytics Management: Analytics data is never deleted, so one approach could be to delete tracking older than X years.

DELETE FROM wp_podlove_downloadintent
WHERE accessed_at < DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 2 YEAR);

DELETE FROM wp_podlove_downloadintentclean
WHERE accessed_at < DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 2 YEAR);

You may also consider using an external service like https://op3.dev for download tracking and analytics. This one specifically could be self-hosted too, but maybe on a separate server instance so it can be scaled separately from WordPress.

But if you’re still on a shared hosting, the quickest, most painless way to more performance is to migrate to a dedicated server. I know of WordPress Multisite instances with many hundreds of episodes on a single root server that work without performance issues.

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