Regarding Forum Speed

[Seb]

We are very aware that the servers are running very slowly at peak times and we are about to begin the process of optimizing our code/database to make both PSU and PS3Forums fast again.

Quite simply we have been getting more and more traffic and this coupled with a lot of slow queries that have arisen from certain code has caused the servers to grind to a halt at busy times.

Contrary to some of the opinions expressed the main reason the forums are slow is nothing to do with the bulky themes, ajax, etc. It is entirely to do with the fact that our database server load has routinely been hitting 40 at peak times (anything over 5 can be considered high).

We have hired a very experienced scaling expert to investigate the issue for us and we already know where the problems are, and we will be fixing them over the next week. Our goal is to make the forums/PSU fast once again and will be working on this however long it takes to achieve.

[Seb]

Yesterday we attempted to modify our database in order to improve the running speed of the forums and PSU. However as you may have noticed it did not go quite to plan and the database server failed. I believe the site was down for about 6 hours and we had to do a restoration from about 1AM EST (March 30th). This may mean you have lost some posts. We are very sorry about this and would like to apologise for any inconvenience this caused. We are trying to figure out what exactly went wrong so that we can actually get the severs running much faster again so that your browsing experience will be much better. Please bear with us on this. I do not foresee this problem happening again but the site may be taken off-line temporarily whilst we perform these changes in future.