[photon]

There's different ways to go about it.. the thing is we're really at a large hurdle, not a lower one like more memory or more bandwidth (like we were before).

The limiting factor right now is the CPU. A CPU upgrade would help, but is very expensive because the server uses Socket 604 processors. We have 2 3GHz ones right now, so we'd have to buy two dual core ones minimum (or a single quad core), and prices on those new are in the thousands of dollars area. More than we paid for the whole server to begin with depending on which ones! The server is old enough and off warranty that I don't like that direction as a long term solution, plus more CPU might just put the bottleneck somewhere else (disk).

A better solution would be to have two servers.. one for the web server, one for the database. That would scale much better.

However of course that means 2 things.. a new server itself is required. We can save $$ by going with a commodity based hardware server (basically a glorified PC) rather than a "real" server. But that's just a one time cost.

The other factor is a 2nd server doubles the monthly costs for hosting the site. I don't know the finances of the site so that'd be a question for Bingo but I assume doubling the monthly costs isn't something to be done lightly.

As Azure said it's a balance.. getting the resources to handle a once in a decade trade isn't a good use of resources, but on the other hand the site does continue to grow. Last year we only had slowdowns at the trade deadline and the draft, this year we get slowdowns after some games as well, but as Azure said in very small chunks.

Anything you donate will of course go to offset the monthly costs and any maintenance and is greatly appreciated.