Subject: upgrade to address sluggishness

I can't see any solid scientific reason for the occasional sluggishness this time. Before I think we were getting crawled by a badly behaved searchbot.  This time everything looks good but our load average shoots way up and page loads take quite a while.

So in the spirit of completely unscientific approaches to solve the problem I'm considering upgrading the web side of things to the next tier.

The hosting company says it could result in "several hours" of downtime.  This graph suggests that about 2am US eastern would be the best and our days look pretty similar. I'm inclined to let them pick (assuming they can even slot this for 2am)

Yikes.  Is this gonna be expensive??

I'd be willing to pay a premium also to help out as I'm sure others would be too. 

Don't worry about it. I used to pay $225/month for dedicated hardware.  Now I pay $12.50/month for the app server and this will take the web server to $25/month, total of only $37.50/month so still a fraction of what I used to have to cough up. But thanks.

MrFixit

We're doing the upgrade tonight. Sorry for the short notice. There will be an hour or so where we're off the Internet. Pillars of the Earth or Sarum are really good books.

MrFixit

Just want to thank you for creating and hosting this site.  I've had hours (work years) of enjoyment.

I'm kicking the tires on it post upgrade.  The slowness seems to be gone.  But the load on the server right now is probably negligible.  Feeding me these difficult games however.....

Looks like tournaments are starting. Investigating...

Bounced the app server piece and looks like tournaments are going again.