A little behind schedule, but things should be "finished"
This is what has been done today;
Forum
Security upgrades performed
Report feature fixed so that it works for all members
Forum images moved to a separate site/IP on the forum server- The effect of this is that instead of opening 1 connection to the forum, your browser will now open 2 connections to the forum; 1 to the forum files and another one to get the images. Two separate processes serving content will provide parallel processing, utilizing our multi-core processors and your browser loads 2 connections faster than 1.
Server
Hardware upgraded - Our server was over a year old. Prices has now dropped on new equipment, so we now get a more powerful processor and more RAM, without paying more.
Software/DB optimization (ongoing process) - This is where the biggest focus has been. Server and DB has been optimized. Due to increased computing power, I have added more indexes to the databases, to speed up data fetching. Further utilizing of PHP acceleration. Instead of loading and compiling PHP scripts, the compiled PHP scripts are now cached (kept in the server memory) and serves up pages faster.
The process of optimizing the database will take about a week, but this should not be noticeable to the members except that the site/pages will load faster.
Search engine optimized further. The entire database is now re-indexed every 15 minutes and this takes less than 10 seconds!!