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.
Recently, I've been asked to report the work I've been doing on RFGeneration as a possible Conflict of Interest for the company that I work for. This is mainly a precaution to cover myself and the site from any future interest from the company, and to protect the company's reputation. While this process is going on, I've been asked to cease any work to the site until further notice. I'm clarifying with them now what access (if any) I'll have to the site until the decision is made (possibly mid-July), but in the interest of protecting the site during that time period, I'll be leaving the staff of RFGeneration.
For many of you that were PM'ing me details with your submissions, please feel free to use the appropriate feedback threads on the Announcement and Feedback forum. Izret has volunteered to help out with the reviews and submissions I normally take and he can reach me if there are any questions if I'm forced away entirely from the site, which I don't expect to be the case. I'll continue to ask any questions posted on the forums and still be a presence if possible, but I don't have any staff access.
In all honesty, this is something that should've happened a while ago that is just now coming up. This helps future-proof the site should there be any concerns that come up, and means that my work would truly belong to RFGeneration.
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