As most of you know, the site's rapid growth forced us to upgrade our server recently. We went from paying $5 a month to $40, but had so many more resources available to accommodate our growth.
The crucial figure of the equation is CPU-usage. Each time you load a page, it sends a request to the server, which connects to the database, runs all the queries, makes the page, and sends it back to you.
At the time of our upgrade, we were getting about 4,000 visits or more per day. That number has climbed over the 8,0000 mark several times this month, and instead of 40,000 page loads, we're averaging around 212,000.
Yesterday (Oct 29), was our second-heaviest day of this month in terms of page load. The last day we had with as many page loads had an average load of 50%, but the recent gradual increase in chat activity pushes that number over 60% frequently.
So, yesterday, when we had our second-busiest day of the month, first day with updated scripts, and one of our busiest days ever, we had an average of only 30%. This upgrade has cut our resource usage in half, cut page load times in half or more in many cases, and given us a lot of room to grow.
Thank you for your continued patience with the various kinks. This has been a very important step forward for us.
