The traffic to this site has been growing like crazy. There are now about 300,000 page views per month. The ads some people are talking about appear if you are not logged in. They are only shown to guests and are not shown to members (who are logged in) and they do not slow down the site. I put them up a about a week ago to see if they would pay for the cost of upgrading servers. It looks like they will only offset costs of the upgrade but I'll be doing it anyway in the next couple of months..
According to the logs, on average, pages in this site take on average 1.8 seconds to load and they say that is faster than 74% of sites on the internet. The logs say the site is actually running faster now than it has since it was launched!
They don't take into consideration uploading to the database (replying to posts, uploading pictures, etc.) and I suspect that is what you guys are having problems with. The problem could be certain times of day during high traffic when there are so many calls to the database at one time.
Don't worry, if things get too slow, I'll definitely upgrade. I'm not trying to beg for donations or anything, but if enough people were to decide to
donate in the next couple of weeks, I could do the upgrade sooner. But if not, it'll happen in the next couple of months anyway. Like Angus said, members contribute to site in one way or another, either with money, helping other members out, writing tech articles, or a combination of the three..... It's the guests who really don't contribute, and that is why I decided to display ads to them... so they could contribute too (even if it's just a little bit).
If it gets unbearable and you're positive it's not your computer or internet speed, let me know and I'll see if there isn't anything I can do to speed things up a little bit before the big upgrade..
