[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all.

As the site has grown over the last 18 months, more content has been added and forum upgrades have occurred which have added additional functionality to the forums. These have steadily increased the size of each page that has to be downloaded from the server when you click on a link, as well as making many calls to the database putting load on the server and draining resources unnecessarily.

While the site was still fairly responsive for the majority of people, it was definitely time to do some long overdue optimisation and see how we can improve the speed and resource usage of the site.

Over the last couple of weeks, Terry (mojo) has been optimising the site by:
a) Removing unnecessary javascript
b) Removing unnecessary styles from the stylesheet
c) Removing unwanted features
d) Saving page templates on the filesystem instead of the database
e) Caching templates
f) Reducing calls to the MySQL database

The first phase of this optimisation has been complete, and already I feel there is a noticeable improvement in the responsiveness of the site. The page sizes are smaller and there are significantly less calls to MySQL reducing the load on the database and the server.

I hope you also notice the improvement.

I imagine it's not going to fix everybody's problem - there are bound to be localised issues that affect some people's browsing experience, but in general the changes should be better for most people.

Thanks