Reopened with caveats

[CALI-gula]

How many of the complainers are paying members? How much are you willing to pay for professional hosting?
Most of us get what we paid for here.

I get your point, and it's valid. But when I also see advertising bars and banners, sales of merchandise, etc., there is obviously fitting revenue from somewhere, and from sources that have greater volumes of cash to make it happen and reap good rewards from that presence than your average pedestrian poster. If I were confident that these latest problems could be solved by throwing cash at them and having a website that has been as reliable as one like - https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums/ - for the past 20+ years, I would certainly pitch in. I donate to charities when I see them pursuing and getting results, and usually because they are 100% volunteer (no payroll for anyone) not simply because they ask for money.

Is funding/cash really what is holding Calguns back in ability to run like that Corvette Forum? Not being a jerk, that's an honest question. Will throwing money at this apparent unknown technical problem actually make a difference? You can fund a Formula 1 car all day, but if there is a technical issue, and the pit-crew can't figure out the problem, how will giving them more money solve the issue if they don't know what is wrong with it in the first place?

For that matter, anyone spending their valuable time to post original content or contribution here at all, helps make money for this site. "Paying member" is not necessarily in the form of cash.

Content is money, and the site is getting that content for free while gaining ownership to it as intellectual property in the process. Views, clicks, and residual feedback to that content further create free material on which the website is profiting. Content is money, and if you get it for free, ever better; ask any social-media influencer or Youtuber, and the replies, likes, and feedback also help them earn revenue from it.

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[CALI-gula]

So why is it that when .NET was down, there were not 2-3k 'lurkers' on .ORG? The .NET website was set to re-direct people to .ORG and there was very little excess traffic over there, certainly not thousands of people who were not logging in. What happened is that the 'bots' could not re-direct to .ORG so there was no attack on that site.

Usage statistics for .ORG show that the traffic was never over 1k members/guests. In fact the most user traffic ever on .ORG was 735, and that was in January of 2020.

I don't waste my time with going over to or posting at .ORG, and suspect most people are the same. Even when the main Calguns.net is down for weeks as it has been as of late, and several months on the previous version, it's a shoulder shrug and I simply move on to something else. 🤷♂️

The only time I've ever gone over to .ORG was when something very significant in results of litigation, or tackling of legislation required all-hands on deck (not that anyone on Calguns does the latter anymore) was also going on in the moment when did Calguns.NET went down. So .ORG was/is just the back-up to keep within the information flow, nor do I need to go over to .ORG to find out why Calguns.NET is down. If it's down... it's down.

When the sun goes down, I don't try to fly around to the other side of the world to chase the sunlight.

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[milw50717]

Is it possible that the database is so 'scrambled' that it's taking lots of processor power to search for and assemble the requested pages?

If so, can it be fixed (or helped) by doing a drive de-fragmenting process?

VBulletin has an admin maintenance page where you can optimize the database tables or even recreate the unique indexes. Given that the database has likely been through some recent dump/import cycles during the server moves I wouldn't have though that the tables or indexes would need to be optimized. The VB tables are pretty well indexed for normal day to day forum use.

Please tell me the attachments are stored on the filesystem and not within the database ....