christopherwoods said:
What was the problem in the end, Peter? Care to share for the curious ones?
Cryx, our heroic god-like sysadmin, has updated the FreeBSD that sits underneath xda-developers.com and installed something called eAccelerator. (The FreeBSD upgrade brought most of the speed increase, I am told.) All of this is sort of stop-gap though, the way phpBB talks to the MySQL database just doesn't easily scale to the size of this operation.
For the slightly longer run, Cryx has joined our star PHP-programmer Elisa in working on the first preparations for the monster logistical operation of switching board software. All in all we're going to be making some profound changes in the way xda-developers looks, works and feels.
Much more news will follow in January, but the gist is that there will be full-time paid people (not me) on call for xda-developers. The flip-side of that is that we will likely have a moderate amount of non-obtrusive ads in the not too distant future. We're still researching and building it all, so all of this is very fresh thinking.