I see this all the time, too, and I know all about it. The launch of the database has added a huge new workload to the server. This is, of course, great news and I'm thrilled for that. This overloaded server "problem" is a great problem to have, because it means that we're doing well, having a lot of activity on the site and lots of pages being viewed.
1) The code for the site and especially the database still has areas that I can re-write to optimize to make them run faster. But I'm pretty quickly running out of those low-hanging fruit items that make big differences in site performance. But I do still have a few things to try.
2) The bigger issue is that I'm going to need to get a faster server for us sometime, sooner rather than later. The server we're on now is great but small. It only has 1.7G of memory which is less than most desktop computers. My $300 laptop has more memory than our server. I'm hosting at Amazon.com and to go to the next server size up quadrupels my monthly rate. So, I need to think of what is the best option here.
I have considered building a new box with a huge amount of memory and hosting it in Dallas like I did with DG. The only real downside to that is this route is also a bit expensive, and when there is hardware problems I have to go to Dallas on short notice to handle it. With Amazon, I just click a button on their website and a new server is brought online and the old one goes away.
Anyway, this is the status update on that. The summary here, I guess, is that this is a very high priority item for me.
