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Hello all. It's been a while since we've communicated out what we're doing about the server, and people have been asking about it. I thought I'd put up a site post so that everyone's aware of the progress we're making here.
We're staging a brand new, 8GB RAM server that will blow this server out of the water. Unfortunately, the brunt of this work right now is on Bickman, since he's the experienced person in server setup and maintenance on the team.
We ran into a snag with PayPal not being a form of payment for our new provider, but Bickman has ponied up and offered to shoulder the cost for the moment until arrangements are made to make the payments via the site's PayPal account by another method, whether that be a PayPal Debit or another method (he's being reimbursed with funds from the PayPal account, of course).
After clearing that problem, it turns out we can't bulk import the site over like we thought, but Bickman's looking into another method to try in the next couple days. Should that not pan out, we'll be manually moving the site over via FTP. After the site's moved, we still need to optimize the databases and see if the added RAM will be enough to allow us to perform the optimization without crushing the server. That will take a day or two to get the results for. After that, we'll need to lock down the site for a couple days while we move it over to the new server, re-optimize the databases, and verify that nothing's broken.
I feel your pain on the performance issues, believe me. I've been trying to use it at night and dealing with the same problems you're seeing, and it's completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, we just don't have the resources on this server to optimize things away, and I can't stand up a sandbox server to attempt optimizations since it made running the production site even worse.
Thanks for staying with us through all of these problems, which have been going on for 5+ months now. Unfortunately, Bickman and I have been unable to coordinate much of anything on the site the past couple months due to work and personal reasons, but we're now actively standing up the server and addressing the problems. Once we're officially moved over, it will give me the opportunity to investigate and address part of the problem that's leading to our overall performance issues, and I'll actually get to wrap up some of the features that I have planned for the site.
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Regardless of how long it takes, I certainly appreciate all the work you guys do to make this site not only possible, but as great as it is.
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^Exactly. Thanks so much, guys, for all your work. Please let us know anything we can do to help. 
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I also want to say thanks to all for all your hard work in making the site work as well as it does.
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So, it appears that my last method of attempting the mass copy basically brought the site down due to performance issues from what I saw.
I'm going to begin pulling down everything via FTP first, then do a process that will only copied changed/new files as we begin to get closer and closer.
The pain of this is that we may need to take an actual down time on the site where no one can access anything. No forums, collection tools, DB tools, nothing. We will essentially stop all database writes as much as we can so that we don't have anything missing once the migration finishes.
So, what my idea is is to pull all assets that we can early so that part is less painful when we switch and do a final pull before the actual migration. I'm also going to do a DB pull that, really, can happen at any time so that we can attempt an actual optimization of the databases on decent hardware.
Hopefully, this process won't take a huge amount of time, but we'll certainly do our best to make sure that the actual down time is as minimal as possible.
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I use the tools on this site almost daily and want to echo what everyone else has said. Thank you!
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Behind you guys 100%. I know you will do what you can to make the site better. Thanks
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Thanks, I treat this place as my Homepage im lost with out it. Its been my daily site for almost 10 years now. I call it my nerd site and my wife knows what I mean.
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Great to hear about the coming change, and I am sure we will all be happy to endure a little outage. I am very thankful to the staff that keep this fantastic site running.
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Great stuff guys. I appreciate all the work everyone involved is putting in. Keep it up!
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