The forums are loading fine for me, but I go to try and buy nd bid on stuff and it is running like molases. I cant even barely load pages to bid! Please fix it so I can spend some money, Thanks

The site's been getting hammered by spammers trying to sign up on the forums. I'm going to be upgrading the forums soon which should solve it. In the meantime I've banned the entire asian-pacific rim (no one else is coming from there anyway except for them anyway.)

but the slowness is not on the forums but the auctions, that affects the auctions too?

Yeah it affects the whole server. Right now forums and auctions run on the same server, but our db instance runs on another machine.

The problem is spammers have been signing up for user accounts on the forums on an average of 30 per minute which is killing overall server process time.

Are you still having slowness on the auction site itself? The next step is for me to clear out old auctions again but I'm leaving that as a last resort.

What does clearing out old auctions mean? This doesn't seem like a bad idea? Also would clearing out old posts on the forums be of any help? Don't think anyone would miss them. Especially in the Promotional catagory, as those don't remain relevant very long.

Spring clean! haha

It means just deleting auctions that ended a long time ago... The less data the site has to cull through, the faster it'll run. Other big sites clear out their old auctions regularly but I never really liked to do it because it eliminates the product history tied to closed auctions.

I now clear it out periodically, although I don't believe this slowness issue was caused by the auction site at all...but instead by a flood of spammers trying to sign up. This is now resolved with the new software...