For the past 2 weeks, our server has become progressively slower. We have been checking what could be causing this - and re-booting our server periodically, which seems to have helped temporarily.
We are pretty sure we have isolated the problem - its related to the settings of the banner ad software package that we are using. It seems to have reached a critical mass.
A reason for this has been the strong level of interest our Taiwanease magazine and Taiwanted classified ads website have been generating - driving even more traffic to the Forums and hence more data for the ad software to deal with. Taiwanease is now 10 issues strong and more writers and distribution points are approaching us. Meanwhile, Taiwanted has grown over 120% in the 3 months after we integrated the ads on the forums. There are now over 500 ads listed on any given day, and we expect this to grow even more soon.
We have been planning a banner software upgrade/maintenance for some time now. Unfortunately, the problems we expected are worse than we feared.
So, we are back tracking to bring performance levels up - so you can read the forums and classified ads, while we work out a solution. This means we remove the banner ads for a few days, and check with our server host about what we can do to increase our CPU capacity.
If you have a mic attached to your computer, you can send us a voice message by clicking REC below