In the past performance issues have creeped up every now and then. This board, as well as bunch of other sites I run are hosted at Hurricane Electric (
www.he.net). HE is usually very careful about not oversubscribing their servers. Personally I believe that serverload is likely not the cause of the performance issues we are seeing.
My theory is that QCDN is at a stage where some mysql query optimizations would be in order (as outlines on the official phpbb boards by users who run larger message boards), as well as verifiying that none of the installed mods is reponsible for slow queries.
So yeah, I do believe the performance is related to the time it takes to receive a query result. What I don't know is why it sometimes works just fine, and sometimes it is slow (which would suggest a server load issue). Perhaps it has to do with the number of active users (just guessing).
I am currently trying to contract Pupusa to see whether he would want to return the board admin to me (please realize that he is not obligated to do so). If that were to happen, then I would likely change the board software to vBulletin, which does seem to handle larger boards better right out of the box without the need to mess with the code.
I have also initiated a help ticket with HE, though it's doubtful that will turn up anything useful because it's tough for them to trouble shoot an intermittent problem unless they are looking at it right when the issue is occuring.
