doomedtoloveyou wrote:
I'm always happy when he puts the paypal up so that I can show my appreciation - I hope everyone else does, too. Be sure to check out the main page

Thank you for reminding me.
Karl Erik wrote:
I am aware of the problem, but am unable to solve it.
This has happened before, and as far as I know, it went away after a while then.
I have tried to tweak settings to ease the load, but I see no improvement.
The next action might be to restart the forums, but i am reluctant to do it.
Thank you!
I hope there are other ways than restarting the whole forum.
Other message boards I visit also ran into performance issues because of a high server load. While some of them restarted (often on a different server or with a different software), others seem to have managed while keeping most of the old board intact (at least one of them also using the phpBB software). There are two things I remember as an answer to these server problems:
- Archiving old threads. Some boards have simply closed all threads beyond a cut-off point (several years in the past) and moved them to a read-only subforum. Others have also hidden them in a moderators-only section and still others have deleted them entirely (after saving them offline, I presume).
- Closing big threads and having a manually controlled thread size limit. This means that threads are only allowed to get to, for example, 100 pages and everytime this limit is hit, the thread gets closed and a successor is opened (e.g. "Thread for Funny Pictures 2"->"Thread for Funny Pictures 3")
However, I don't know if the performance issues these other boards ran into were of the same nature. The search function wasn't the only thing having problems but the boards themselves - they became slow and often didn't load at all. Meanwhile ER is still loading very fast for me and downtimes are almost non-existant.
I don't have a technical background myself, this is just how I remember it from the point of view as a regular member. I hope some of it is relevant. Maybe a user with a greater knowledge of these things can give his input.