So, after some research, it looks like the chat is slowing the site down sometimes. This makes sense, as each post in the chat is basically a tiny forum post which gets written to the database and also calling these posts up to display the chat is also something that uses resources. Most of the time our server handles these requests just fine, but when the chat gets both very active and crowded, it can sometimes strain things in a way that has briefly disrupted our forum's functionality (e.g. posts not posting when you hit the button, pages taking too long to load, etc).
One of the things I can do to speed things back up is by having less things to make the server recall. What I'm getting at here is our chat archive is getting pretty huge now (over 5,000 pages, since last February when it was last cleared. So after the new year starts, I'm going to change the settings so it only holds the messages for a limited amount of time (I'm thinking 90 days would be good). But I figure I should first make an announcement so if you want to save any old chats you have a chance, and also so you don't mistakenly expect that chat content will be kept forever like we do with forum posts.
I may make some other additional tweaks to make it run more smoothly but if there's anything else major I'll post it here. Overall things are still working well but if I don't make this change, the problem will intensify and I'd rather address it now than later when it becomes more serious.
One of the things I can do to speed things back up is by having less things to make the server recall. What I'm getting at here is our chat archive is getting pretty huge now (over 5,000 pages, since last February when it was last cleared. So after the new year starts, I'm going to change the settings so it only holds the messages for a limited amount of time (I'm thinking 90 days would be good). But I figure I should first make an announcement so if you want to save any old chats you have a chance, and also so you don't mistakenly expect that chat content will be kept forever like we do with forum posts.
I may make some other additional tweaks to make it run more smoothly but if there's anything else major I'll post it here. Overall things are still working well but if I don't make this change, the problem will intensify and I'd rather address it now than later when it becomes more serious.