With a surge in bot traffic, the site has been under some extra strain lately. So I used this as an opportunity to find more ways to optimize the site code and queries.

I changed the way the site handles unread messages for users and staff. This made most of the pages on the site up to 20% faster.

I made some content on the site less dynamic for guests by disabling AJAX for some content on some pages (such as game pages). This gives some pages on the site a speed boost for guests.

The New Posts page was really slow at loading and slow loading pages that get used often also put strain on other pages of the site since it's putting strain on various tables of the database. This page is about twice as fast at loading now.

The Retro Game Room index page was slower than it should be and it's one of the most viewed pages so it was important to speed that page up. That page (when not searching for anything) is around 35% faster.

I did a bunch of other small optimizations on various pages but too many to mention.

The new posts page is practically where I live, so this is much appreciated. Thanks David.
I appreciate all the work you've been putting in to the user experience lately.

I did some more optimizing to the index page of the Retro Game Room / Video Game Room, index page of the Video Game Music Room, and the index page of the site. I also made all of the content on the site index page no longer dynamic at all for guests which also helps overall performance. The site feels significantly faster after all these updates, even when we have 1000 bots on the site.

I did a few more optimizations throughout the site over the past week. The big one I just made today though significantly improved the speed of the Private Messages page, especially for users who have a lot of messages. I've got a lot and this page would average between 1.5 - 3.0 seconds to render but now it's at around 0.100 - 0.150 seconds.

I love seeing improvements like this making the site more fun to use just on the account of I'm not waiting for something to happen, I just hope this doesn't take a ton of time but knowing what you've said in the past about coding and stuff like that I imagine this probably was time consuming.

I remember feeling like I broke the site when I was on a post spree a month ago and the site was experiencing some strain XD I'm glad that change is helping!

SonicOlmstead : A lot of this is unfortunately time consuming. Sometimes it's a little time consuming just brain storming ways to speed up the site but thankfully that brain storming can take place anywhere (for example, I can do my brain storming when I'm somewhere else doing a tedious mindless job). I think the time I invested into this (and also SEO) is definitely starting to pay off though with the recent traffic boost (which I'll post about later).