Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I'm afraid it's a combination of things. The sad truth is that The Sift is dieing - the DB has become unmanagable, and the site is constantly pegged into the red zone. We are a victim of our own success.

The good news is, we are about to shuffle off this faltering husk and slide into a brand new, blazing fast box, and entirely shiny new version of the site.

Make sure you jump with us - imagine getting left behind on the old sift, with everyone gone- you'd be able to listen to the wind howl - as lonely as Chernobyl.

So hold hands with your Sift buddy, We'll do a head-count when we get to the other side. Seriously, it's coming soon.

I hope it's soon!!! Maybe you need start disabling stuff, add limits, etc. to the old Sift?

are you doing both the move and the upgrade at the same time? what about moving old sift first for performance reasons then just install the new sift side by side on the same box. Once you go live the old sift should not cause performance issues becuase it wont be used.. It would just increase your disk space requirements having a duplicate db. Btw how big is the db?

Let's give out free puppies to every new member.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Yeah, we're doing it all at once, moving to the new server migrating to the new software. Really, what could go wrong?

Free puppies for all. I'll have mine pan-fried, in white wine sauce.

Puppies? Uh, why?

I've noticed the slowdown lately too. Maybe that's why the VS Alexa Rank is going down. (??)

And +1 for free puppies.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Yeah, we're really just trying to hold things together on the old boat. I'm sure our Alexa has suffered a bit because of slow page load.

I think if the site is a little pokey there is an "abandonment level" from incoming links that increases. I know, for me - if some site I'm visiting doesn't load in 2 seconds, I hit the back arrow.